Documenting Minamata with Eugene Smith
Mr. Motomura said, ‘There’s a place called Minamata, would you want to go and photograph there?’ And the moment we heard that, the first time we heard that people could actually be killed by industrial pollution, we just immediately, without hesitation, said yes.
I took this photograph after dinner with the Kamimura family at their home in Minamata in 1972. My photography partner and husband, Eugene Smith, and I lived just a few minutes away. Kamimura Yoshiko is holding her eldest daughter, Tomoko, afflicted with congenital Minamata disease. Like so many others in Minamata, Yoshiko didn’t know that fish from Minamata Bay were contaminated with methylmercury effluents from the Japanese chemical company, Chisso.
I will never forget the stillness as the late sun streamed through the window on that late afternoon just before Christmas Eve, 1971, when Gene took the photograph, “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath.” There was just the slight sound of the moving bathwater, Gene’s bated breath, and the sound of the camera clicking. Later, in an interview with NHK, Yoshiko said, “people won’t understand this suffering unless they see it.” The Kamimuras’ second daughter, born just a year after Tomoko, now tells me about the complicated feelings she and her siblings had about letting outsiders into their home to photograph the most private part of their lives…
Here, Tomoko and her mother are surrounded by her six younger siblings and their father, Yoshio. Gene is standing behind them next to an editor from Asahi Camera. The actor Sunada Akira, who performed his play about Minamata victims all over Japan and his wife Emiko are there too. To their right is Ito Kimiyo who, like the Sunadas, moved from Tokyo to support the Minamata disease victims, which she still does today.
To me, this photograph symbolizes many things. The faces of the people, the memory of sharing a delicious meal prepared by Yoshiko for us, the essence of what connects people to each other. After half a century I have come to more fully realize how difficult it must have been for the Kamimuras to let people with backgrounds alien to them into their lives in order to let them tell their very personal story—so that they could break through the wall of ignorance and neglect and let all of Japan and the world see what had happened in Minamata. There was no way we could ever really understand their hardship, but nevertheless, they let us into their lives.
JA