#commonsdamage — Public Fediverse posts

.> The mercury poisoning “incident” in Minamata has been grandly pronounced resolved at least four times since the pollution began in 1932 and Minamata disease was officially recognized in 1956.2 In 1959 the Chisso Corporation paid compensation to fishing cooperatives and “sympathy payments” to patients that required them to renounce all future claims against the company. It did not accept responsibility for the disease. At the same time, it also installed a “Cyclator” to purify its wastewater, without announcing that the Cyclator did not remove mercury. At a ceremony at the end of 1959, Chisso’s president publicly drank a glass of water from the Cyclator, without announcing that the wastewater from the acetaldehyde plant, which contained mercury, was not being run through the Cyclator. An eerily similar performance took place on March 24, 2011 when Tokyo’s Governor Ishihara Shintarō drank a glass of tap water on national television to “prove” that it was safe from radioactive contamination.

I was in #Toroku over the weekend learning with Asia Arsenic Network NGO, Miyazaki Prefecture's Forestry Dept, and Minami Kyushu University. The arsenic mine and kilnes that sickened and killed people is considered pollution (#公害 or #CommonsDamage). One speaker pointed out that when damage reaches beyond the workplace they are chalked up to #pollution, until then they are chalked up to #OccupationalHazards. He made me re-read a page of #Galeano's #ChildrenOfTheDays to remember #Ramazzini.