Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 208
978-0-7425-0020-4 • Hardback • October 2001 • $138.00 • (£106.00)
978-0-7425-0021-1 • Paperback • October 2001 • $51.00 • (£39.00)
978-1-4616-4218-3 • eBook • October 2001 • $48.50 • (£37.00)
Keibo Oiwa is an anthropologist teaching at Meiji Gakuin University in Yokohama. Ogata Masato is a fisherman and activist in Kyushu, Japan. Karen Colligan-Taylor is professor emerita of Japanese studies at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
Part 1 Translator's Introduction
Part 2 Prologue: "Out to the Mythological Sea"
Part 3 Part I
Chapter 4 A Vibrant Village
Chapter 5 The Bitter Sea
Chapter 6 Competing Souls
Chapter 7 What's Going On?
Chapter 8 Two Hints
Chapter 9 Within the Circle
Chapter 10 School Days
Chapter 11 A Family Ordeal
Chapter 12 Leaving Home
Chapter 13 A Compass Restored
Part 14 Part II
Chapter 15 Rising Tides
Chapter 16 Social Activism
Chapter 17 Life Changes
Chapter 18 Leaving the Movement
Chapter 19 The Depths of Despair
Chapter 20 Facing My Demons
Chapter 21 Tokoyo no fune, Boat to the Eternal World
Chapter 22 Bearing Witness
Chapter 23 A Will of Stone
Chapter 24 A Place of Atonement
Part 25 Part III
Chapter 26 Beneath the Light of the Sun and the Moon
Chapter 27 The Chisso Within Us
Chapter 28 Keep the Embers Glowing
Chapter 29 Nusari, Embracing Life as a Gift
Chapter 30 Moyainaoshi, Moored Together Again
Chapter 31 Epilogue
It is an important story, focusing on the socioeconomic aspects that get short shrift in the biomedical literature. The book recounts Masato's childhood, coming of age, self-realization, and the crusade he carried out to gain recognition for sufferers of Minamata disease.
— Choice Reviews
Oiwa Keibo eloquently transcribes Masato's story from early days and a simple life fishing the Shiranui Sea, through the growing shadow of the disease across family community and livelihood, to a struggle for compensation marked by growing self-awareness and powers of leadership and, in an extraordinary act of redemption, the decision to withdraw from the certification process for which he had fought so long and hard, and take control over his own fate, free of dependency. Ogata rows the eternal sea as the pilot of his soul-disease and its discourse transcended.
— Times Higher Education
Ogata has a message that goes further than what happened in Minamata.
— Kyoto Journal
Wonderfully translated and interpreted now for a Western audience, what was a worthy book has become a great book that articulates the pain of a sensitive pilgrim recounting a dramatic and universal tale of progress.
— Gavan McCormack, The Australian National University
This book is a diamond, an eloquently told life history of compelling importance and profound depth. Masato's story is relevant to English readers on many levels, not just as a personal account of an environmental tragedy and travesty with global implications, but also as an exposé of the ways some corporations and governments degrade humankind and the earth, as an exploration of life in a traditional Japanese community, and as a unique opportunity to learn from a man of extraordinary spirit, dignity, intelligence, and wisdom.
— Richard Nelson, author of The Island Within