The Wonderful Country

(This text was published in Spanish in the first issue of the Mexican printed magazine El Cine Probablemente in October 2021. https://elcineprobablemente.com/anteriores.html)

The filmmaker Kazuo Hara and Tadashi Ninomiya, professor from Kumamoto University, sail Minamata’s sea in a motorboat. Accompanied by another researcher, they wear colorful scuba diving suits (blue, neon yellow, and red with black, respectively). The three men are willing to dive into the ocean, so that they can extract samples from the surroundings of the aluminum anodes which prevent the iron containers that retain mercury in the land reclamation from oxidating. Their descent and their exploration underwater show a diversity of animals, textures, and changes in the light: the turquoise of the water mixes with the gray cylinders and the floury sand; the seaweeds and the lichens seem to be dancing; and a shoal of soles and goldfishes moves to the beat of Hara’s breathing through the snorkel. This sequence from Minamata Mandala is key for elucidating the procedures by which the last documentary of the veteran Japanese filmmaker work. It is beautiful and terrifying at once. The beauty is inherent to the marine landscape’s lavishness. The terror comes from watching the corrosion of the living entities and the environment they inhabit. Thus, this moment is a declaration of principles and ways of approaching a subject. Hara suggests that the only possible manner of filming events with the scope as those related to the catastrophe of Minamata—the pollution of the waters caused by the petrochemical corporation Chisso—is, literally and metaphorically, the action that he himself performs in this scene: going beyond the surface, diving into the ocean’s deepest parts, and committing himself cautiously to its subject matter to challenge how we perceive reality.

The title evidences the film’s structure and substance: a perfect oval shape constituted of small intimate universes that prefigure a totality. The disaster that took place in Minamata bay during the fifties, because of the mercury poisonings that caused a disease among the inhabitants, is seen through a multiplicity of perspectives. By means of the personal and collective experiences, Hara’s movie restores the communal quality of this place: before being the name of a disease, Minamata is a village. Thus, we see the works and days of a land touched by pain: countrymen, physicians, lawyers, fishermen, authorities, journalists, researchers, and caregivers interact over the course of time. With a running time of over six hours, the film alternates between personal testimonies and lawsuits of the people seeking the recognition as Minamata patients, to materialize a wide range of emotions and timeframes. 

“Senses enrich our lives”, says doctor Ninomiya, when he explains what causes the Minamata disease to some patients who are not acknowledged with it. What is terrible about this condition is that, since it affects the brain and not the peripheral nervous system, the patients lose their senses without knowing. The doctor insists on that to his colleague doctor Ekino. That is the reason why the patients don’t experience pain, but, instead, they have a lack of sensation which they are uncapable to recognize. However, sensation is not the same as feeling. The film, although it shows suffering explicitly, is full of ways of feeling: emotions blossom in it. The experience of love is very recurrent—although subtle—in the way the filmmaker approaches the subjects he films and in some of the relationships that are shown. For example, there are a couple of marriages whose relationships seem imperishable, thanks to the mutual support they express between them. In the case of an elder couple, the woman says that she doesn’t want to live anymore. When she comes back home from an asylum, the are many traces of all the preparations and the caring labors that her husband did for her with great expectancy. Similarly, it is very touching to see how, in the cozy intimacy of their dining room, Hideo Ikoma and his wife tell their story with such enthusiasm and detail.

Talking about emotions, Minamata Mandala is full of smiles. Despite the pain and the impotence of decades fighting, there are happy smiles. The characters laugh in more than one scene and experience pleasure. In this sense, the documentary doesn’t lack humor. This humor turns out to be a little bit uncomfortable when we become aware of its subject. For example, toward the end of part one, doctor Ekino searches for a dead patient’s brain, who, before dying, voluntarily decided to donate it. When they find the organ, he and his colleague go through the subway carrying the brain inside a white bag.  We forget that they are carrying is the center of the nervous system. The way in which the sequence is choreographed (long shots inside the public transportation) and the doctor’s rascal smile create a comical effect out of an otherwise solemn action. The event becomes uncomfortable when the dead’s family, who had formerly exhumated the body to obtain the brain, asks back for the brain. The sensation that remains, I insist, is one of discomfort because of the lightness with which the researchers act; but, in the end, this passage emphasizes the concrete, material qualities of Minamata Mandala’s universes.

Hara expresses concern regarding the power of images: how to film a collective tragedy without being immoral? In the lawsuit’s sequences, for example, camaras and microphones are shown in a quite noteworthy manner. Even when these could have been imperceptible or naturalized in their setting, as mere ornamental tools, their constant appearance in the shots make them relevant, as if they were additional characters. Inside the courts, camaras possess a hostile expectancy, while outside they have a stalker quality. Inescapably, their trenchant presence rises incisive questions: what is the difference between the audiovisual register made by Kazuo Hara and that made by journalists and reporters, who also follow closely the Minamata situation? Though the question cannot be answered entirely, something clarifies the difference between journalism and cinema. The media is expected to cover legal processes like these ones because they are public events with many political implications. Nevertheless, Hara’s technical equipment also appears in the scenes where he registers the testimonies: a shot shows his camera at the distance; microphones enter and exit through every border of the frame; the preparation for some of the interviews is evident. These instances are not simple mistakes of craft; they are not pretensions of “sincerity” either. Instead, they are visual indications that establish a contrast between ways of seeing and listening.  

The tension between the characteristics of different types of images can also be seen in the fragments from newscasts belonging to the period covered in the film. A memorable one is that from the first encounter in five decades between the Japanese emperors and the Minamata patients. The meeting is mediatic and diplomatic, as if it was orchestrated to give an idea of false hope. We can also add the credit scene from In the Shadow of a Rare Disease, a television show from 1959, produced by NHK. In it, the silhouette of an apparent Minamata patient drinks water with trembling hands. A testimony lets us know that the man we see was a performer. Here there is another internal inquiry that makes explicit a necessity for truth and brings into question the ways in which tragedy should be approached. That weekly program told, dishonorably, the story of the patients: the “actor” was a blurry shadow, just a silhouette covered by opacity. In contrast, the people with the Minamata disease in Hara’s film are always themselves in their more intimate and pure existence; they are filmed with a sober clarity that allows to memorize traces, gestures, and stories. For example, every time mister Mizoguchi raises his hands after the small victories in the lawsuits against the authorities or when Shinobu Sakamoto sings in tears upon the stage of the Cultural House. It is unforgettable the difficulty with which Hideo Ikoma moves his paint brush on his little boat, the permanent smile of Jitsuko Tanaka, and the love that Takako Isayama has for Disney’s princesses. Hara always films them frontally and in close-ups impregnated by light.

The film sets a device that directly contrasts the relationships between preexistent images and the ones registered by Hara. The filmmaker confronts people he films with previous materials in which they appear. When he visits the Tanakas, he shows them an image of Jitsuko when she was a little girl. Hara guides the family to their past, as he searches for truth. The medicine book where Jitsuko is portrayed—although in a beautiful picture—makes of her a patient without a name. In contrast, for Hara, she is a person with a story, personal traits, and complex family relationships due to the caring dynamics. After being recognized as a Minamata patient, Mr. Ogata watches a recording of one of the lawsuits in which he lost his temper; he doesn’t recognize himself in that furious man anymore. Similarly, Hideo Ikoma watches some recording in which he was fifteen years old. In them, the young man goes through the different tests to confirm that he has the disease. His movements, the light and a cat make a film out of a medical tape. All the ways in which the different images about a same topic interact allow to weigh concreteness and to choose truth. What is important, in the end, is that Hara understands everything as a part of the world. That’s why he doesn’t impose a position and leaves certain things in the realm of allusion. 

This search for truth relates Hara with Ekino and Ninomiya, the starters of the Copernican revolution in Minamata disease studies. Their patience, their permanent commitment, and examining situations to their very limit are aspects that make evident the similarities of scientific and aesthetic duties. Even when the film doesn’t have the purpose to inform nor to report, it follows a complex process with several social and historical implications. For this reason, it is not strange that, for moments, the film has a didactic quality because it gives the spectator tools for a better understanding of what is being shown. The film gives clues to visualize the intangible. Hara uses maps, diagrams, graphics, and animation with data about the Minamata disease and its many consequences. Furthermore, these make the image dynamic and become some sort of punctuation mark inside an immeasurable structure. 

Time in Minamata Mandala has a transcendental quality, beyond its length of over six hours. Specifically, the film shows human beings pierced by time. Temporality overflows the specific durations of the three parts marked by intermissions, the long sequences devoted to testimonies or lawsuits, and the extension of each shot. The film requests a permanent attention to the details and to the multiplicity—even saturation—of elements in the frame. Each frame is a mandala by itself. The documentary contains an infinite chronology that evidences that time is not only a measurement unit, but a heap of conceptual possibilities. It encompasses, “in present time”, fifteen years, approximately; nonetheless, it always goes back to the beginning of the problem during the fifties. In each testimony there are glimpses of the past too. Each action ramifies in time and, though the future cannot be shown, it is left opened as a possibility for these lives. The film is an infinite seed.  

The caution and care with which Hara listens and observes has as consequence a recognition of the most elemental. The first sequence I discussed highlights, because in a film where testimonies, people, and the spoken word are so preeminent, exploring the seascape is contrasting. The silver water is beginning and ending, a territory of cause and consequence, and a source of nourishment, but also pain. The ecosystem created by Kazuo Hara emphasizes every form of life in the world. For that reason, an orange tree in the snow, a sashimi dish, and a brain’s texture become indelible objects. Minamata Mandala contains an unfathomable phenomenon in an equilibrated manner. Within disparities, there can be traces of harmony, correspondence, and interrogation; but, above all, there are uncountable moments of beauty and emotion.