Minamata: The Victims and their World is an honest and bleak portrait of the victims of Minamata disease filmed by documentary director Noriaki Tsuchimoto. Through the movie, Tsuchimoto did what Chisso and Japanese government officially failed to do.
The movie presents one of the most famous and terrible examples of the indifference of corporate entities to health and human welfare. For the narrative of corporations and politicians, putting financial gain ahead of public health and safety is commonplace in Japan. But Minamata is still the single worst long-term, man- made industrial pollution disaster in the world.
During an interview, a journalist asked Noriaki Tsuchimoto why he focused entirely on the victims in the movie. Why didn't he talk to anyone from the company or the government? Tsuchimoto said this is the shame of Japan. In 1950s, shortly after the defeat of Japan, the Korean War broke out, many factories in Japan became the supplier of the U.S. military supplies. Because of this, Japan's industry began to revive. In that time, the Japanese chemical industry was at the forefront of high technology in the world. MITI was very supportive of this cause. Disease was first reported in 1953. As a result of poisoned by the pollutants, several residents of the vicinity of Minamata developed extensive health problems. But the government officially recognized it eight years later. If the government took immediate measures, the death toll would have round 100, but it was shelved for 10 years.
“In the first round, the national papers largely ignored Minamata. The regional and local papers did little investigative journalism and usually took a detached, "neutral" stance, which tended to benefit the company more than its victims.”(Timothy George, P37)
According to the movie, we see the victims had resisted the efforts of television documentary crew because of their deeply held suspicions about the media. Tsuchimoto wisely decided to foreground the voices and faces of the victims themselves in this documentary. Although authority figures had betrayed the people of Minamata, Tsuchimoto has won over the people with his friendly, sincere manner. He occasionally appears in the film, usually partly or wholly off-frame, holding a microphone in his hand and gently coaxing his subjects to talk to him.
At the end of the movie, an explosive confrontation at a Chisso stockholder meeting, the Minamata victims earned a large compensation package, but nothing can bring back the dead. To this day, they still fight for compensation.
