![]() Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow is a powerful record of victims’ suffering and the movement to support them. Beyond playing an outsized role in organizing the Minamata struggle, Ishimure influenced the movement’s cultural history and memory and articulated its symbolic legacy. Ishimure Michiko served as a key activist and spokesperson for the Minamata protest movement, producing over forty volumes of writings in various genres: docufiction, historical novels, reportage, autobiography, poetry, children’s books, and a Nō drama. But this rapprochement in the 1990s took place slowly and with difficulty, as the pain of previous decades was still alive and aching. Fifty years later, renewed efforts began to conserve the environment and reconcile with victims of poisoning, including a flurry of museum-building, citizen waste recycling campaigns, and conferences, symposia, and exhibitions. Yet for decades after, victims of what is now known as Minamata disease suffered neglect, discrimination, and ostracism by Minamata residents, local government, labor unions, Minamata disease certification committees, and fishers’ cooperatives. In the early 1950s, numerous cases of organic mercury poisoning were discovered in the fishing villages around Minamata, Japan. Originally published in Japanese in 1972, with this translated edition published by Michigan University Classics in Japanese Studies in 2003 (notes by Livia Monnet). An account of Minamata disease, which struck a small Japanese fishing village due to methylmercury poisoning of the sea.
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