FEATURE: Minamata woman faces up to mom s prejudice over pollution disease By Keiji Hirano, KYODO NEWS - 4 hours ago - 14:15 | Japan, All
When Rie Koriyama read a highly acclaimed book during her college days on Minamata disease, a mercury-poisoning ailment that ravaged a small coastal city in southwest Japan, she was astounded that the mother she thought she knew so well could act with such callousness toward a sufferer. Kugai Jodo (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow), written by the late Michiko Ishimure, a writer and activist who did much to publicize the victims plight, quoted a member of a sufferer s family as saying that a general store operator in Minamata refused to physically handle money from the victim s mother for fear of contagion.