[Ed. Note: This article is part of a special section entitled “Japan-Adjacent: In Praise of Creative Expression within Japan’s Shadow,” edited by Laura Hein.]
I am an emeritus professor of history, retired from the University of Rhode Island. I was raised in Minnesota, Japan, California, and Hawai‘i, and have lived a total of 17 years in Japan since 1962. I have also spent a year in China and roughly half a year each in Southeast Asia and Tajikistan. Photography has been a hobby since childhood. I began with film, mostly slides, and transitioned almost completely to digital by 2004. I have focused on outdoor, travel, landscape, and recently also on bird photography, but have done theatre and sports work as well. I have digitized 1,200 of the approximately 12,000 slides I kept over the years, and have a digital library of nearly 50,000 photographs taken since 1964. Photographs shown here from 2006 and later were taken with digital cameras, while those taken earlier have been digitized from color slides. In this essay I illustrate how photography has played a role in my research, publication, and teaching, using images from a chain of connected projects.
My Ph.D. research and first book used Minamata’s mercury poisoning as a lens through which to view Japan’s postwar democracy, and I also visited Niigata, site of the “second Minamata disease,” several times.1 In Minamata I learned of a lesser-known pollution incident, also in Kyushu but caused by arsenic, in the mountain village of Toroku.2 My Toroku research led to a trip to Bangladesh, where Japanese activists who supported the Toroku victims reinvented themselves as an NGO focused on arsenic poisoning from deep well water. Another project compared rural revival (machi-zukuri or furusato-zukuri) efforts in Minamata with those in Otaru, Uwa, and Tsumago.3 I have also visited Ashio, site of the copper mine that caused Japan’s first major modern pollution disaster. In the summers of 2012 and 2014 I co-taught a graduate field seminar for students from the University of Rhode Island, the University of Tokyo, and National Taiwan Ocean University, investigating the recovery of coastal fishing areas in northeast Japan after the disastrous tsunami of 2011. I taught at Zhejiang University in China in 1980-81, and when I visited again in 2006 I was able to see the changes brought by China’s rapid growth to its environment. For all of these projects I have used photographs to document my research and travels and to illustrate publications or lectures.
My first photo is not from a research project, though it set me on my way. Blurry from hand shake, it is one of the first I ever took. I stood on the ledge outside my father’s office window in the 3M Building in Tokyo, holding the window frame with one hand and a Kodak Instamatic 100 camera received a few months earlier for my ninth birthday with the other. I learned important lessons, beyond the obvious one that steady hands and faster shutter speeds (the Instamatic was fixed at 1/90 second) can make for better pictures. Being in the right place at the right time matters. Finding a different viewpoint can be helpful—this one both got me above the crowd and showed it, and also showed the just-completed Hotel New Otani in the distance. Finally, photographs preserve memories. How I wish I could have been steadier, or used a faster shutter speed! The latter became possible within a few years when I began using my father’s Leica.
The second image is from a few days later, when my family attended an Olympic soccer match between Hungary and Morocco. This time my hands were steady. Nearly every man in the photo is wearing a suit, though some have removed their coats on this beautifully clear and warm October day. Such details can seem unremarkable at the time but years later provide evidence of how things have changed. I will return to this point near the end of this essay, but often wish I had photographed many more “uninteresting” scenes of daily life decades ago.
I begin with this image because at the core of the Minamata story is the relationship between the people and the sea, one that is intimate and personal, unlike the industrial scale of Japan’s pelagic fisheries. This image illustrates that close dependence of many of the people of Minamata on the sea, a dependence that turned toxic when mercury used by the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory was dumped into the sea from 1932 to 1968. The serenity of the sea is balanced by the awareness of the invisible poison that threatened the livelihoods and lives of Minamata’s fishing families. I converted this scanned color slide to monochrome for two reasons: images in my book on Minamata could only be in black and white, and it is pattern, line and tonality, rather than color, that make this image work for me. Of course the great photographers who made Minamata’s tragedy known to the world, beginning with Kuwabara Shisei and then W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith, also photographed in black and white.
In Minamata, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, victims who tell their own, their families’, and their communities’ stories are known as kataribe. After decades of mistrust between patients and government officials, Hamamoto Tsuginori was the first to agree to speak as a regular kataribe at the city-run Minamata Disease Museum. One of the earliest patients, he lost both parents to the disease, and traveled to Europe and Southeast Asia to warn of the dangers of mercury pollution. I have used this image in my talks and teaching as a reminder of the importance both of contextualizing Minamata (with the atomic bombs, pollution elsewhere, and more) and of not only interviewing sources directly but also observing how they tell their stories to others. I hope it helps viewers imagine hearing about history directly from people who experienced it, and even created it.
I knew Hamamoto well enough that he was comfortable with me observing and photographing him. (He sometimes brought my family vegetables that he harvested.) My job as a historian is to be an honest witness, to tell the Minamata story, and to explain what I think it means and how it helps us understand modern Japan. One key to that is understanding how the participants themselves tell their stories and how those stories are spread. This photo illustrates two layers in that process: here Hamamoto was speaking to an audience including leaders of a museum in Osaka preparing an exhibit on Minamata.
Niigata Minamata disease, discovered in 1965, was caused by mercury discharged by the Shōwa Denkō factory into the Agano River. Here a group of scholars, doctors, and activists visits the area. Unsurprisingly, we were not allowed to enter the factory. It should be clear to readers by now that not all of my research is done in dusty archives. I “learn with my feet,” walking and observing the places I study, and talking with and learning from my subjects and others who lived through the events I research. In Niigata, Toroku, and Ashio I have been able to join groups of scholars and activists on their regular annual visits to “ground zero” pollution sites, which has served as an efficient way to both jump-start my research and to make important personal connections. This image invites viewers to do the same thing. As a reminder that we were in Niigata, this was April 19, and it snowed briefly as we approached the location of this photograph.
The mercury used by the Shōwa Denkō factory as a catalyst in the production of acetaldehyde, in the same process used at the Chisso factory in Minamata, was dumped into the Agano River from this spot. The bright, rich green of early spring clashes with the viewer’s knowledge that the mercury brought the darkness of death and suffering to many who ate fish caught in the river. Unlike Minamata, where the mercury was discharged into Minamata Bay, the fact that this mercury was dumped into a river meant that Niigata Minamata disease victims lived downstream rather than in the same community as the factory, so they faced fewer economic and social constraints against suing the company. Niigata victims sued in 1967, two years before those in Minamata, and won in 1972, though the settlement that the Minamata victims received in 1973 was larger than any in Japan’s prior legal history. Still, the court cases did not answer questions of government responsibility, and many victims were unable to receive government certification as patients. Minamata disease sufferers have therefore never felt that redress went far enough, and the issues surrounding responsibility for Minamata disease were not resolved.
A photographer I met in Minamata, Akutagawa Jin, has long been active in photographing and supporting the arsenic poisoning patients in Toroku in northern Miyazaki prefecture. At his urging I visited tiny Toroku, site of Japan’s fourth officially recognized pollution disease.4 In Toroku an Edo period silver mine was reopened as an arsenic mine in 1920 and operated until 1962. Ore was burned in a kiln and arsenic in the smoke settled on the surrounding area. Prior to the Asia-Pacific War, before DDT was available, some of Toroku’s arsenic was sprayed on U.S. cotton fields to combat boll weevils. Some also went into chemical weapons Japan used in its war in China.5 Both uses are reminders of a core lesson of environmental history: everything is connected. Arsenic linked this tiny mountain village to the rest of Japan and the world. This photograph of the closed mine tunnel, from which water continues to pour, is a reminder of Toroku’s suffering. There is still some arsenic in the water, but as the Toroku River is joined by others downstream it is diluted. Officials assure citizens that the level of arsenic in the river is negligible by the time it has flowed six kilometers downstream to reach Ama no Iwato Shrine in Takachihō, the site where Japan’s foundation myths say Amaterasu the sun goddess hid in a cave until she was enticed to come out and return light to the world.
This is not Marie Kondo’s style! When I show this photograph I leave it in color so viewers do not think this is a very old scene. Even the residents were young by Toroku standards at the time I took this image. This is a twenty-first century farmhouse kitchen with an earthen floor and a wood-burning stove, though there is propane for cooking. This family heats their bath with wood, as did many of our neighbors when my family lived in Minamata in the 1990s. The resident farmers live this way not due to poverty, though they are not at all wealthy, but because they live by different values than those we assume to be the norms for Japan. This is the husband’s family home. The wife is the daughter of a Catholic activist who became a key supporter of the Toroku victims. Of course homes like this in Japan are disappearing as the nation ages and the countryside continues to lose population. But that has been happening for decades now and many such homes still remain. When students visit or study in Japan I always encourage them to spend as much time as possible outside of Tokyo and other major cities. Big cities are important, of course, but they will spend plenty of time there without any additional encouragement.
After a settlement compensated Toroku victims in 1990, their main support group applied its expertise elsewhere by evolving into the Asia Arsenic Network. Natural deposits of arsenic in the Himalayas were deposited downstream by the major rivers originating in the Himalayas over time. That arsenic, well below the surface in western Bangladesh, polluted deep wells drilled after independence in an attempt to combat water-borne diseases. That good intentions can have unintended harmful consequences is one of the most important lessons I hope my history students, and all of us, can learn. The AAN helps test wells and install facilities such as pond sand filters that remove arsenic and are easily maintained by villagers. I traveled to Bangladesh to see how this locally based group from Miyazaki transformed itself into an international NGO. Had I used a series of photographs to tell a story here, I might have shown the process of testing water, drilling wells, and installing filters, but for a single photo the obvious choice is one showing villagers’ pride and sense of ownership of the final result.
Viewers of this photograph might raise questions about permission or exploitation. I see no such problems here. Along with an NHK reporter/photographer, I had joined an AAN group visiting area villages, and this young woman knew the AAN members. She was clearly proud to show off the the safe water from the pond sand filter her village had helped install and had taken responsibility for maintaining.
In addition to the lingering problems caused by its mercury pollution, Minamata in the past half century and more has also dealt with the same problems as the rest of Japan outside of the major cities: a declining and aging population and the hollowing-out of industry. In 2008 I returned to Minamata and traveled to three other locations across Japan to study and compare varied attempts at local survival and revival. In the Hokkaido city of Otaru, after a long struggle by citizens’ groups part of the historic brick warehouse-lined canal was saved from being paved over for a highway. However Otaru’s canal, warehouses, shops, and restaurants now draw so many tourists, and so much of the money they spend goes to outsiders, that Otaru residents question what was saved and what was lost. This image shows tourists at a popular spot for viewing the canal and warehouses.
Overtourism has recently become a concern for all of Japan’s popular tourist spots, as for many others around the world including my home of Hawaiʻi. But Otaru’s dilemma does not mean the fight to save the canal, despite its unintended consequences, was a mistake. It would be difficult to argue that something else would have been better, or that there should be no tourism, in Otaru or in other overtouristed sites in Japan. The questions now are how much is too much, who manages it, who benefits, and how tourists can be enticed away from overcrowded spaces to other locations.
In my modern Japanese history course I assigned Gail Bernstein’s Haruko’s World: A Japanese Farm Woman and Her Community, an account based on her stay with the Utsunomiya family in the hamlet of Besshō in the Shikoku town of Uwa in the 1970s. She had long been a model for me of how to do research by becoming a member (though necessarily partial and temporary) of the community one is studying, and I tried to follow her example by living in Minamata. With an introduction from her, I stayed briefly with the Utsunomiyas to learn how Utsunomiya Shōichi, who served as mayor for 22 years, had dealt with typical rural problems. Like local leaders elsewhere he worked to attract government funding for various facilities, one of which is a nursing home and day care center for the elderly that provides more, more permanent, and better jobs than typical projects such as bridges and meeting halls. He also inspired the “hydrangea road” walking path that bisects the rice fields he had helped reorganize and rationalize decades earlier, and that helps bring residents together, as this photo illustrates. Here a group of local men weed and trim the path behind him.
I present Uwa not as an alternative to the path followed in Otaru, but as an example of different creative responses to challenges faced by a far more rural and less populous area, one that could never expect to rely on tourism. Utsunomiya Shōichi was a community leader and spokesman for decades, and sought solutions that would keep young people in town by bolstering local pride and most importantly by providing dependable jobs. He also hoped some young people who had moved away to cities would return home in a “U-turn,” as one of his grown children eventually did. This sign on the walking path encourages residents to “always greet each other with smiles.”
Tsumago was a post town on the Edo period Nakasendō inland route, counterpart to the coastal Tōkaidō, linking Edo and Kyoto. In 1968 a campaign was launched to redevelop and revitalize Tsumago by preserving it as it had looked a century earlier in order to attract tourists, while keeping control and income in local hands. Some 800,000 tourists per year were visiting by the start of this century, more and more of them walking stretches of the old Nakasendō. Today one needs to stay into the evening, when the tourists have left or retreated to their inns, to find the main street deserted enough to easily imagine Tsumago in the days when it hosted traveling daimyō and their retinues.
Yet Tsumago is not some Disneyland-style recreation of a fairy-tale past. After 1868 it became a backwater and suffered no major fires, unlike Magome, the next post station toward Kyoto, which burned in 1895 and was the boyhood home of the novelist Shimazaki Tōson who wrote about this region in Yoakemae (Before the Dawn). There had been relatively few changes to Tsumago’s Edo-period townscape when in 1968, the centennial of the Meiji restoration, residents established a “Love Tsumago Association.” A “Residents’ Constitution” adopted in 1971 enjoined residents not to sell, rent, or tear down buildings. No garish signs, or advertisements for things such as ice cream that would have been unavailable in the Edo period, were permitted. Had development been allowed to proceed organically, today the main street might be lined with convenience stores, or perhaps Tsumago might have simply ceased to exist as villagers left to find work elsewhere.
Each year the Standing Committee of the Ōta Association for the Eradication of Watarase River Mine Pollution holds a preliminary meeting in their office and then conducts a site inspection in Ashio. Ōta City is on the Watarase River downstream from Ashio, and was a farming area impacted by the copper mine’s poisonous effluent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I had long wanted to visit Ashio, but always prefer to make such visits through connections to knowledgeable, involved local groups if possible. I became acquainted with the environmental scholar Sugai Masurō when he commented on a presentation I made on my Toroku research, and he let me know of this opportunity and arranged for me to join the group. In this meeting they carefully reviewed data from the past year and discussed specific sites they intended to visit and questions they wanted to ask mine officials. I have many photographs similar to this one, showing meetings of scholars, activists, and government and company officials, and have always derived useful insights for my research from observing such meetings.
Once again, as in Niigata, we are at the site of a major environmental pollution disaster. The purposes of the Ōta group’s annual visit are to hold the Furukawa mine to its promises to avoid releasing any more toxic chemicals into the river, and to monitor the recovery of the environment around the mine, which was finally closed in 1973. Here the members of the group are listening to an explanation by a company official about the containment of the tailings staining this basin a sickly red. Later these men (and they were all men, the oldest of them over 80) scrambled up and down the surrounding hills, parts of which are still bare due to toxins from the mine, where we saw rusting mine machinery and the company’s attempts to control erosion. The Ashio mine area is now a historic site and a tourist attraction. For me, this photo works better than it would with no people in it, since it invites the viewer to think about this group’s long commitment to Ashio, and to ask questions they might be asking. Why is the water still so red four decades after the mine closed? The dam we are standing on may hold back the water, but can we trust the company that none of the toxins are leaching into groundwater or making their way into the river?
Repeated flooding of the Watarase River in the late 19th and early 20th century spread mine pollution downstream from Ashio, poisoning farm fields. The government decided to create a flood catchment basin, though its purpose was more to protect Tokyo than to help the farmers. Tanaka Shōzō, the politician and environmental activist who had brought Ashio to national attention in the Diet, moved to the village of Yanaka to support the last farmers resisting removal. In 1907 the government destroyed the village and completed the project. In 2013 I attended the shinnnenkai (party celebrating the new year) and meeting of the Standing Committee of the Ōta Association for the Eradication of Watarase River Mine Pollution. We then toured the basin, now ironically transformed into a flourishing wetland recognized by UNESCO under the Ramsar Convention for its protection of waterfowl. Finally, as the fading sun provided beautifully evocative light, we visited the site of Yanaka-mura.
The March 11, 2011 tsunami created by one of the largest earthquakes in history devastated this coastal area of Ōtsuchi in Iwate prefecture. When the seminar I co-taught visited the area in the summer of 2012 there was a memorial erected by a neighborhood association where only foundations of homes remained. The tsunami had swept through even the fourth floors of larger buildings. I expect that these students will remember this sight and this experience more than anything I have ever said in decades of teaching. I hope that the same is true for the students I brought to Hiroshima to hear a kataribe speak about her experiences surviving the atomic bomb. Showing this picture in class cannot come close to having the impact of standing in such a place and hearing a survivor describe losing family members, home, and fishing boat, but I hope that the memorial in the foreground, and the small figures walking toward the destruction, draw viewers into the scene and into contemplation of the disaster.
During our 2014 summer seminar looking at recovery from the tsunami we took a ferry from the major fishing port of Kesennuma in Miyagi prefecture to the nearby island of Ōshima. There on the beach we hauled in a net, picked out the fish, and grilled them for our lunch. In this photograph the people and net serve as a leading line guiding the eye from shore out to the sea. I hope to encourage the viewer, like the students, to consider how the ocean that took so many lives and brought so much destruction has supported and fed so many people for countless generations.
During that same 2014 summer seminar some students were able to visit the home of a resident (far right in the photograph) of Katsurashima, one of the Urato islands, to interview her about her life and her experiences during and since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. A University of Tokyo faculty member and I interpreted. This was a new type of research and a moving experience for students whose previous research had likely been based only on materials found online and in libraries. For photographs such as this, with a number of people in a confined space, I often carry a very wide angle lens and hold the camera up to look down on the scene for a fly-on-the-wall perspective. While I frame virtually all of my photographs by looking through the viewfinder (a quaint or even puzzling practice to those familiar only with cell phone cameras), in this situation a tilting monitor comes in handy, as I can angle the monitor to allow me to frame the shot while holding the camera high above my head.
I used these two photographs in my modern Chinese history course to illustrate the dizzyingly rapid change in China. When I taught at Zhejiang University it 1980-81, it was on the outskirts of this city that then had a population of around one million. Private cars and indoor heating were prohibited, my next-door neighbors cooked with charcoal outside their front door, and the only two faculty members who owned refrigerators had brought them back from the United States 30 years earlier. I thought little of the first photograph when I took it in 1981, but it turned out to be a valuable record of a place that was about to undergo dramatic changes. When I took the second photograph in 2006 the city was choked with private cars, many bicycles were electric, construction of the underground metro system had begun, and a faculty member I visited owned his own car and an apartment furnished with German appliances. The huge new main campus of Zhejiang University was far in the distance in this second image. The greatly expanded city now has a population of over twelve million.
This is my one “art” image for this essay, a photograph of a famous bridge on a causeway in West Lake in Hangzhou. On this rare snowy morning I carried my Nikon FM camera in a day pack on my run, an uncomfortable choice that turned out to be worthwhile. There was little light so I had to brace myself to keep steady for the relatively long exposure, and hope that the person walking with the umbrella was far enough away not to move so far in the scene as to be blurred. It was not until months later that I got the slide film developed in Hong Kong and discovered I had succeeded. There was almost no color in the scene, so I have converted it to black and white. This is one photograph of mine that has actually been sold. Like the photograph showing the net being hauled onto the beach, this image also uses the leading line technique.
Since 1996 “Minamata Exhibitions” have been held around Japan, offering exhibits, lectures, discussions, and more. For the first Minamata Exhibition, documentary filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki arranged to exhibit several hundred iei (portraits for display at funerals and in home shrines) of deceased Minamata disease victims. He and his wife had asked families to allow him to copy the photographs so that there would be a record of the victims’ existence. Some relatives refused, and some agreed but did not allow the iei to be displayed publicly, hence the empty black squares in this display at the Minamata Tokyo Exhibition (For privacy purposes I have blurred the displayed portraits.)6 This hesitancy is evidence of the discrimination and bullying victims faced.
I intend this photograph to be an invitation to stand with the viewers shown here and to consider these victims as human beings, not simply targets of stigma. I have written much about the importance of citizens’ groups, of laws and regulations limiting pollution, of compensating victims, and of supporting rural regions. These problems are still very far from solved. But to the extent that awareness has spread and small improvements have been made, it is local residents and victims themselves, more than outside supporters or government officials, who have struggled the hardest and deserve the most credit.
This photograph, I hope, may also make us think about what we see when we look at Minamata, and what we write and say and do about it. My teaching and writing have been inspired by W. Eugene Smith’s explanation of what he and Aileen M. Smith had tried to do in Minamata:
Putting aside the possibility of being “objective,” we set our energies to the task of honestly understanding the complexities of the situation. … After our three years of living involvement, we began to try to enclose our material between the covers of this book in a way that would transmit the life-forces we had felt. We have tried to be honest, and fair, and if our understanding is great enough we may have approached the truth…
To cause awareness is our only strength.7
Notes:
- Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001).
- Timothy S. George, “Toroku: Mountain Dreams, Chemical Nightmares,” in Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, ed. Ian Jared Miller, Julia Adeney Thomas, Brett L. Walker (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013).
- Timothy S. George, “Furusato-zukuri: Saving Home Towns by Reinventing Them,” in Japan since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble, ed. Christopher Gerteis and Timothy S. George (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
- The other three were Minamata disease mercury poisoning in Minamata and Niigata, itai-itai (“it hurts, it hurts”) disease from cadmium poisoning in Toyama prefecture, and Yokkaichi asthma from sulphur dioxide in Mie prefecture.
- Poison gas used in China was made with arsenic from Toroku on the island of Okunoshima. An interview with a worker at the plant is in Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: New Press, 1992), pp. 199-202.
- For more on the Tsuchimotos and their process of collecting these iei, see George, Minamata, pp. 289-90; and Christine L. Marran “Temporality and Landscapes of Reclamation: Johnny Depp Goes to Minamata,” in Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema, ed. Rachel DiNitto (Association for Asian Studies, 2024).
- W. Eugene Smith, “Prologue,” in W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith, Minamata (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 7-8.
