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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
On 22 March 2011, an exhausting court battle finally ended for over 2000 victims of mercury poisoning in Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectures. In sum, the agreement, decades in the making, was as follows as outlines in the Japan Times (31 March): “Chisso will provide some 90 percent of the plaintiffs with a ¥2.1 million lump sum each as well as a ¥2.29 billion fund, and the central and prefectural governments will shoulder part of their medical costs.” Chisso Corporation's dumping of methyl-mercury in nearby waters caused Minamata disease, as the painful ailment came to be known after it was first recognized in 1956. Half a century later, time is running out for these victims to receive the official recognition they deserve, as their bodies are growing increasingly frail. The mercury that poisoned their bodies was carried through the fish they ate and accumulated as it moved up the trophic tiers in a process called biomagnifications. In this process persistent poisons, such as mercury, concentrate in the upper echelons of the food chain. In biomagnification, organisms at the top of the chain carry higher levels of toxicity in their fatty tissues.
1 Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2001), 34.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Noguchi also stated that contamination by strontium was of concern because it can take 18 years for half of it to be discharged as waste matter from humans and because it can be accumulated in the human body due to characteristics similar to calcium, Asahi, 7 April 2011.
5 Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010).
6 Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1181, 2009—a volume entitled “Chernobyl: Consequence of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment,” 291. If the cesium-137 is in the water column or plankton and zooplankton, then the fish cannot excrete it as it is taken up by the fish until the cesium lives out its halflife. Belton A. Burrows, Thomas C. Chalmers, and John A. Cardarelli, “Global Fallout Distribution in Fireplace Ashes,” Department of Medicine, and the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Section, School of Public Health, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts and Nuclear Medicine Service, Boston V. A. Medical Center. See also HELCOM, 2010. Hazardous substances in the Baltic Sea – An integrated thematic assessment of hazardous substances in the Baltic Sea. Balt. Sea Environ. Proc. No. 120B.
7 HELCOM, 2010.
8 Link.
9 Link.
10 For detailed report of the levels of cesium-137 in affected areas, biota, and adult and children's bodies after Chernobyl see: Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1181, 2009—a volume entitled “Chernobyl: Consequence of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.”
11 Steingraber, 49. And children are more susceptible for their lower weights. From 1995 to 2007, up to 90% of the children from heavily contaminated territories of Belarus had levels of Cs-137 accumulation higher than 15–20 Bq/kg (see Yablokov, et al).
12 As stated in a study of artificial radionuclides in seawater in the Baltic Sea over the years 1999-2006 by HELCOM, the fate of any pollutant introduced into the sea is determined by both its own chemical properties and hydrographical conditions of the sea itself. In the case of cesium-137 being introduced into the Baltic Sea, the greatest concentrations of it will be found where there is less current to move the water, where it can bind to sediment particles in brackish water.
13 Link.
14 For example, following the analogy of Chernobyl, up until 1991 the United States imported food products with measurable amounts of Chernobyl radioactive contamination, mostly from Turkey, Italy, Austria, West Germany, Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Sweden, and Denmark.
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