First published in 1969, Kugai Jōdo: Waga Minamatabyō (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow) is a non-fiction autobiography by the late Japanese author Ishimure Michiko that recounts the tragic Incident of Minamata Disease—the worst case of industrial pollution in modern Japanese history. Resulted from the collusion between Chisso Corporation, the then second-largest chemical complex in the World, and the Japanese government, this incident has victimized over 70,000 with mercury poisoning and left catastrophic impacts on the environment between the 1940s and 1970s in Minamata, Japan. For decades, Chisso and the government worked to deny and suppress information about the disease and trivialized its impacts on the environment and lives of Minamata.
Countering such denial which silences the voices of the victims, human and non-human, Ishimure’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow weaves together personal narrations from victims of Minamata Disease, their families and friends, along with journalistic documentation, proses, scenic descriptions of Minamata, and imaginative realist narratives that Ishimure (co-)created with the victims, to present an alternative account of the incident. Through this literary work, Ishimure reveals to the Japanese communities that the Minamata Disease extends far beyond the mercury poisoning itself. It encompasses the deeper, less visible forces of its pathogenesis—namely the destructive toxins of modernization and industrialism under neoliberal capitalism, which continue to pollute and silence both human and natural lives within and beyond the Minamata region.
Forty-two years after the book’s publication, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) introduces concepts that resonate deeply with the Minamata incident. Specifically, Nixon’s “slow violence,” which refers to “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, [or] an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all,”[i] precisely captures the systemic issues underlying the environmental and humanitarian disaster in Minamata. Due to its prolonged and diffusive qualities, slow violence tends to have lower visibility, at least “outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media,”[ii] and involves a longer process of being recognized as violence, which ironically contributes to its longevity, diffusion, and even its magnitude. As a result, by the time slow violence becomes perceptible to the public—beyond the immediate group of victims who have endured it from its onset—what unfolds is often catastrophic with long-lasting consequences. This paper argues that the case of Minamata Disease is an exemplification of slow violence. Not only was the violence in Minamata marked by the excruciatingly long duration of the disease but also, more significantly, by the delayed “discovery” and persistent dismissal and trivialization of the disease, which further prolonged and exacerbated the suffering of the victims as well as the environmental damage to the nature. Both the villagers and the nature were rendered by the Japanese government-industrial complex as what Nixon terms “unimagined communities”— “communities internal to the space of the nation-state…[but] whose vigorously unimagined condition becomes indispensable to maintaining a highly selective discourse of national development.”[iii]
One gesture that Ishimure makes to counter this gradual and reductive violence in Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow is through spiritual activism. This paper argues that, by appealing to the local (pre)animistic worldview and the Buddhist notion of Tariki (Other-Power) embraced by most Minamata residents, Ishimure’s writing gestures towards a relational framework that reclaims the victims’ subjectivity. This framework, which I term “(pre)animistic ecological solidarity,” is rooted in the beliefs in the interdependence of all sentient beings and reliance of the Other’s power. It reimagines the meaning and parameters of “subjectivity” beyond the humans to include non-human subjects. The key mechanism of Ishimure’s (pre)animistic ecological solidarity is sympathy, of which function is inherent in (pre)animism and Tariki.[iv] In Ishimure’s writing, the effects of such sympathy are evident in the inter-actions and inter-reliance between the natural and human spirits of Minamata. When human and non-human spirits enter this relationship directed by sympathy, they are entering a relational process or a processive relation that binds all sentient beings together beyond the confines of human subjectivity. In this relationship, subjectivity is no longer determined by human agency centering their sense of being around the agents’ understanding and interaction with the history of subjection. Instead, one is a subject when one becomes part of this (pre)animistic ecological solidarity. Not only does this understanding of subjectivity escape the conundrum that Ndlovu-Gatsheni talks about when he discusses the challenge of reclaiming South African subjectivity, namely, the enduring entanglement of South African subjectivity with white colonial subjection and the framing of black subjects as objects,[v] but it also repudiates the “premises of individualism” on which the neoliberal capitalism that generates slow violence operates, presenting an alternative vision of human-nature relationship—one defined by interdependence and sympathy rather than domination.
[i] Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011, 2.
[ii] Nixon, Slow Violence, 6.
[iii] Nixon, Slow Violence, 150.
[iv]Toshiya Ueno in “A Woman on the Shore in Ecosophy and Archipelagic Thinking,” 和光大学現代人間学部紀要 [Wako University Bulletin of Faculty of Human Studies] 17 (2024): 173.
[v] See Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 134, 136–137.
This paper employs Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence” to examine the systemic issues underpinning the environmental and humanitarian disaster in the Minamata Disease Incident—the worst industrial pollution in Japanese history—and show how the Minamata villagers were rendered “unimagined communities” by the Japanese government-industrial complex during postwar modernization. As is often the case in contexts marked by slow violence, literature emerged as a form of resistance in Minamata. This paper explores Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, a major driving force in the Minamata protest movement, and suggests that her writing, appealing to the local (pre)animistic worldview and the Buddhist notion of Tariki (Other-power), gestures towards a relational framework that reclaims the victims’ subjectivity beyond their subjection to objectification. This framework, transcending the confines of human agency, repudiates the “premises of individualism” on which neoliberal capitalism operates and reimagines a human-nature relationship characterized by sympathy and interdependence.