Minamata Disease and Environmental Governance

Abstract: This article aims to clarify the conditions necessary for environmental governance through a case study of one of the most tragic examples of environmental destruction, the Minamata disease. The Minamata disease is methyl‐mercury poisoning resulting from the ingestion of contaminated fish and shellfish. The first incident of the Minamata disease occurred in the mid‐1950s, in Kumamoto Prefecture. In spite of the grave lesson that the pollution in Kumamoto provided, Japanese society went on to experience a second occurrence of Minamata disease in the mid‐1960s, in Niigata Prefecture. Conflicts between victims, the companies responsible for contamination, and the central and prefectural governments have continued for the past 50 years. As a whole, the history of the two incidences of Minamata disease shows a lack of environmental governance in Japanese society. Effective environmental governance is the ability to produce adequate solutions to a variety of environmental problems. In order to resolve an environmental problem such as Minamata disease adequately, four tasks must be achieved. These are the discovery of the cause, the prevention of suffering, recovery from suffering and the learning of a lesson. What factors are crucial to the achievement of these tasks? Through an analysis of the history of Minamata disease, I would like to point out three fundamental factors that have a decisive influence on the solution of an environmental problem. They are the existence of an effective and just juridical system, a mature public sphere, and the quality of individual actors who are concerned with an environmental problem. The following conditions are important to the fostering of environmental governance on a more concrete level: sensitivity of the society and the ability to set an agenda, autonomy of the research process and of any research groups, organization of the antipollution movement, an adequately designed system for compensation, and various measures which help to counter socially amplified suffering.     

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS IN POSTWAR JAPANESE SOCIETY

Abstract  We can distinguish four historical stages of environmental problems in postwar Japanese society. Historical retrospect shows that Japan was one of the worst countries concerning environmental disruption and that it experienced various issues corresponding to the change of main investment domain. Since the late 60s, residents' movements of victims pushed the business world, the national and local goverments to take more strict measures for the protection of the environment. New policy framework was defined in the beginning of the 70s. But further improvement of environment policy was not carried out under stagflation of first oil crisis. As a result of economic growth, Japanese society multiplied its demands on the ecosystem and it became a society characterized by a "separate-dependent ecosystem" and by "one-way consumption." Diseqilibrium of the power balance and defects in the decision-making process are basic social factors that have accelerated environment destruction in Japan. Despite apparent change, these social conditions continue to exist without change, and constitute an obstacle to the development of an environment-oriented technology and a transformation into a more "regenerative" society with a "self-supplying ecosystem."