Place, Body and Nature: Rethinking Japanese Sense of Fudo and Minamata Disease

Abstract

The idea of place has been a common concern in human geography including among feminist geographers since the 1970s. While the question of place in Western cities has been critically discussed, place or place-making and displacement in the non-Western world have not been well developed. The author addresses the issue in terms of the idea of ‘fudo’ (milieu) which has been subject to particular attention in Japanese philosophy and geography since the 1930s, owing to popularization by Tetsuro Watsuji and Augustin Berque. In this paper, the author highlights the ideas of fudo through illustration of a grave historical case of suffering in Japan: Minamata Disease. Minamata Disease, caused by the consumption of fish contaminated by methyl mercury, emerged in the 1950s. This tragedy can be understood as the outcome of three scales of fudo relationship: 1) the interrelationship between the local marine ecosystem and fishers’ practice on the sea; 2) political and economic domination of Minamata city by the Chisso company; and 3) national sentiment and the human-environment relationship in Japan at the time. I highlight the narratives of two women in Minamata, Michiko Ishimure and Eiko Sugimoto, as cases that embody the local fudo relationship. Their narratives present essential interactions in Minamata between the sea, land, deities, embodied lives and survival, which collectively construct fudo. Simultaneously, these narratives illustrate Minamata, a place that now attracts people from elsewhere interested in curing their minds and bodies. By connecting divided localities, the local people’s movement reconstructed the fudo in Minamata that was once destroyed.