Freeing Subjectivity from Subjection: Countering Slow Violence in the Tragedy of Minamata Disease with a (Pre)Animistic Ecological Solidarity

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.