Published in Nikkei Asia 10/09/2021
Hollywood has a Japan problem. Even when a film is nominally “about” Japan, such as The Last Samurai (2003), the drama is in the character development of the main — inevitably Western — protagonist. Thanks to his Japan experiences, the drunken American mercenary, played by Tom Cruise, recovers his self-respect – and gives Emperor Meiji some sound advice on how he should rule the country.
Minamata which was commercially released in August, is a much better and more serious film, and Johnny Depp is a far superior actor to Tom Cruise. Furthermore, W. Eugene Smith, the character that Depp plays with such remarkable skill, was a real person.
He lived in the pollution-stricken town of Minamata for three years, got badly beaten by company toughs and produced one of the most famous images in the history of photojournalism, capturing a severely disabled victim of mercury poisoning being lovingly bathed by her mother in the family home.
The real Eugene Smith
The cinematography is excellent, as is the supporting cast. Minami, who plays Smith’s assistant and later wife, gives the relationship an asexual aspect that is unusual and touching. Yet precisely because the film claims to be “based on real events,”, it also needs to be judged with a critical eye.
There are two flaws that serve to flatten and simplify the story. The first is the unnecessary exaggeration of Smith’s role. He is portrayed as a “white saviour” who wins the battle for the community, while the role of local Japanese activists is downplayed.
Environmental activism has a long tradition in Japan, stretching back to protests over the country’s first major pollution disaster at the Ashio copper mine in the late 19th century.
The second is the facile parallel with other corporate disasters, listed at the film’s close. These include the appalling thalidomide scandal of the early 1960s and India’s Bhopal gas leak of 1984 in which many thousands died. Conflated with these horrors are the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater oil spills which devastated coastlines but caused no deaths amongst the affected communities.
More controversial is the mention of “Fukushima.” On that terrible day in March 2011, an earthquake and resulting tsunami killed some 20,000 people along Japan’s north-eastern coast, mainly by drowning. The related meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power station caused by the tsunami led to one death and 16 injuries.
For anti-nuclear activists to make that the main event is to disrespect the memory of the victims of Japan’s worst natural disaster in living memory.
From Fish to Cats to People
Minamata disease is the best known of the four major illnesses caused by industrial pollution during Japan’s turbo-charged recovery from the smoking ruins of World War 2II. It is named after the small town on the west coast of Kyushu where the outbreak took place.
Chisso, a chemical company which was Minamata’s major employer, had been discharging methylmercury into the sea since the 1930s.The first sign of the poison seeping through the food chain was the behaviour of cats, which suddenly began “dancing” spasmodically and then died. Humans suffered neurological damage and many died horrible deaths too. Women who remained healthy bore babies with severe birth defects. Unusually, the placenta did not protect the unborn child from toxins, but absorbed the mercury.
From Sean Michael Wilson’s excellent Minamata manga
Shamefully, Chisso stalled for many years and refused to accept liability. Matters were complicated by different factions amongst the townspeople, some of whom were dependent on the company for their livelihoods. There were also unfounded concerns that the disease could be contagious, which led to the social ostracization of sufferers.
The company stopped dumping the methylmercury several years before Smith arrived in Japan in 1971. By then, the struggle was about the level of compensation and who was qualified to receive it, with the company attempting to reduce its liability to the bare minimum.
In the film, Smith decides to take on the Minamata project after a young Japanese activist called Aileen shows up at his Manhattan apartment and hands over a wodge of documents about the disaster. At first he is reluctant to visit Japan — flashbacks reveal his traumatic experiences as a war photographer in the Pacific — but he finally agrees.
In reality, Smith had already spent a year in Japan in 1961-62, working on Colossus of the Orient, a photo essay about Hitachi Corporation, and living in Roppongi with a young American assistant-cum- girlfriend. When he returned nine years later, it was not to lead a crusade, as the film suggests, but to oversee an exhibition of his work.
Aileen, who he brought along with him, was a half-Japanese student at Stanford who was thirty years his junior. It was a Japanese photographer who brought the Minamata story to his attention. The subject had attracted massive media interest domestically, with some photographers staying in the area for years. Smith followed in their trail.
The film has a fictional scene, in which the boss of Chisso is shown gazing at Smith’s just-published Minamata photo essay in Life Magazine. “We have to pay”, he mutters with tears in his eyes. The implication is that Smith’s work was the decisive factor in obtaining justice for the sufferers, not the long and ultimately successful legal battle waged by the activist groups.
Hiroyuki Sanada plays a firebrand activist
In another scene Smith and Aileen bluff their way into the Chisso Hospital and find secret files revealing that the company had known about the link between the cat deaths and human Minamata disease for years. That revelation did indeed deliver a crushing blow to Chisso’s credibility, but it had nothing to do with Smith. Rather, the director of the Chisso Hospital, long retired and wracked with cancer, made the sensational admission on his deathbed.
Dying of ‘everything’
The film ends with a neatly packaged resolution, when in fact the reality was as messy as Smith’s famously chaotic living conditions. The fact that he and Aileen married is mentioned, but not that they divorced a few years afterwards. Smith’s death in 1978, it is claimed, was caused indirectly by the injuries that he suffered from the beatings by company goons.
That is not what his biographer thinks. According to Sam Stephenson, he was suffering “from diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, severe hypertension with an enlarged heart”, having been an alcoholic and “amphetamine addict for most of his adult life… As was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of ‘everything’.”
Smith made his name as a combat photographer at Saipan and Iwo Jima and elsewhere. A bullet wound in his mouth troubled him for the rest of his life. From there he went on to become America’s premier photo-essayist, travelling the world to capture images of Albert Schweitzer in Africa, Welsh coal miners, Spanish peasants and a black midwife in Mississippi.
His work was socially conscious and eye-opening at a time when the photographic image, published in large format magazines, was almighty and photographers were stars in their own right.
Television put an end to that era, and Smith saw it coming. As biographer Stephenson notes, he had always been concerned about the tension between photojournalism and art, and greatly admired musicians and writers. In 1957, he left his wife and four children and moved to a loft in Manhattan which became an open house for New York bohemian society.
Jazz greats such as Thelonious Monk and Chick Corea passed through, as did Salvador Dali and Norman Mailer. Another visitor was Toshiko Akiyoshi, one of Japan’s most celebrated jazz artists. In 1976, she recorded a jazz suite called Minamata and won the album of the year award from America’s prestigious Downbeat jazz magazine.
Smith spent most of the 1960s working on projects that never happened. Wired on amphetamines, he stayed in his dark room for days on end without sleep. He also electronically miked the entire building and recorded everything that went on, from jazz jams to intimate conversations to TV shows. Altogether, there are 4,500 hours of tapes in the archive at the University of Arizona, including several of random street noise recorded in Roppongi in 1962.
Smith appears to have spent long years searching for some sort of artistic breakthrough. He achieved it at Minamata. In particular, his masterpiece, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath, transcends the circumstances of the pollution controversy protest to create an image for the ages, one that recalls the greatest works of religious iconography.
Smith was a much stranger and more complex character than the Hemingway-esque boozer of the film, but he was no saviour. He transformed his Minamata experience into superlative art, and surely that is more than enough.
Despite such reservations, it would be a great shame if the film were to be “buried” because of Johnny Depp’s current legal troubles, as the director Andrew Levitas fears. It deserves to be seen widely, as a warning of what can happen when technological advance is not properly monitored.
