Exhibition shows Chisso union's Minamata efforts

An exhibition of documents compiled by a Chisso Corp. labor union opened Friday at Hosei University in Tokyo, showing how its members dealt with Minamata disease caused by the chemical company.

Helping hand: Dr. Shigeo Ekino (right) assists Masafumi Takishita, who suffers from fetal mercury poisoning, as they walk in Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, in June 2007. AP PHOTO

Launched in 1946, the union strove to secure stable working conditions for its members, but became aware in 1968 that it was "shameful" as humans and as employees not to help the victims or address the contamination of Kumamoto Prefecture's Minamata Bay.

The mercury poisoning disease broke out in the 1950s and continued into the 1960s, affecting about 2,300 people, including 1,700 who died. Since then, the union has been helping those with Minamata disease by testifying in lawsuits on their behalf and promoting activities to assist them.

It also held a meeting with victims and their families in front of the Chisso factories, declaring Chisso workers themselves "victimizers."

"I hope the exhibition will make the public aware of how the in-company union supported the Minamata disease sufferers," said Masanori Hanada, professor at the Open Research Center for Minamata Studies at Kumamoto Gakuen University, which currently has about 100,000 union records and maintains a permanent exhibition on the poisoning.

"Visitors will be able to see the overlap of the history of the Minamata disease issue with that of Chisso workers," Hanada said.

The exhibit shows transcripts of the union members' court testimony, along with around 100 other union documents, including fliers and demonstration photos. It runs through Nov. 8.

Among the items displayed is a union newspaper, issued on May 26, 1970, that called for the company to compensate the victims or risk being "socially eliminated."

The exhibit will travel to Osaka in late November, to Kumamoto Gakuen University in the city of Kumamoto in December and to the city of Minamata in January 2010.

The union was disbanded in 2005 when its last two members retired. The documents were later entrusted to the university's research center, which aims to disseminate the lessons learned from the mercury poisoning incident.

Minamata disease is a neurological disorder that struck local residents when Chisso flushed waste water contaminated with mercury from a synthetic resin plant into Minamata Bay. The mercury entered the food chain when residents ate contaminated fish. A similar poisoning was confirmed in Niigata Prefecture in 1965, caused by wastewater from a Showa Denko K.K. plant.

The Diet enacted legislation in July offering relief to previously unrecognized victims of the poisoning. The law splits Chisso, formally known as Shin-Nippon Chisso Hiryo K.K., into two entities — a holding company responsible for financially compensating the victims, and a subsidiary that continues to operate the business.

The holding company will use dividends and proceeds from sale of the subsidiary's stock to make lump-sum payments to sufferers. The parent company will be liquidated once it makes compensation.

Some victims and their supporters, however, oppose the policy, saying the liquidation "will allow the victimizer to avoid atoning" for its actions.