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 fe…READ FULL ARTICLE
