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Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 220 Minamata Part 2.

As the 1960s began and Japan entered into a new age of high growth that would see it vault from war-torn and impoverished to the world's second strongest economy, the people of Minamata could rest easy.

They'd been told, after all, that their largest employer, Chisot, had accidentally released

pollutants in the Minamata Bay, which had contaminated the local fish, but the problem had been fixed.

A new filtering system was in place, no more contaminants were going to get released, the problem was solved.

Except, of course, that it was not. The filtering system did not work, despite Chisot's claims to the contrary,

and just how uncontained the problem was, really became

very clear when another outbreak of the Minamata disease took place, this time not in Minamata,

but on the other side of Japan. The second round of Minamata disease broke out in Niigata,

on the other side of Japan on the coast of Honshu.

...