Episode 319 - Minamata, Part 1

History of Japan

Isaac Meyer

Japan, History, Japanese

4.8 • 744 Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we're beginning a deep dive into the history of one of the most famous cases of environmental poisoning in Japanese history: Minamata disease. How did a chemical factory end up poisoning the people of a small town in rural Japan for years before anyone found out? And why, once it became clear that they were being poisoned, did it take so long for anything to come of it?

Show notes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This week's episode is brought to you by Audible.
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0:36.1	never read anything by Mary Roach, well, you're in for a treat.
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1:34.0	Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 319, Minamata Part 1.
1:40.9	This week, I want to start talking about one of the greatest scandals in Japanese history.
1:45.5	It's a very important watershed moment, really, in the history of post-war Japan, but it begins in a pretty unassuming place, the town of Minamata in Kumamoto
1:51.5	Prefecture in Kyushu. For most of its history, Minamata has been a sleepy little fishing town
1:58.1	without much in the way of action or excitement to recommend it.
2:02.2	However, that all started to change in 1906, thanks to a Tokyo Imperial University graduate
2:08.5	in electrical engineering from an old samurai family by the name of Noguchi Stagau.
2:15.9	Noguchi had started out after graduation working at Siemens, the German engineering firm.
2:21.4	His specialty was the production of a compound called calcium carbide used to make certain kinds
	...

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