Lecture on Minamata Disease, Osaka University, May 2019

A lecture on Minamata disease, the more than human social movement that emerged from it, and the ecologies and infrastructures that were involved delivered by Professor Atsuro Morita of Osaka University during a summer intensive course with professors and PhD students from Toronto University. The lecture outlined the refusal of Minamata movements to accept the logic of monetary compensation, disturbing modern political sensibilities by involving non-rational techniques and actors, for example the public displays of mourning emblematized by the black flags designed by homemaker and "shaman" of the movement, Ishimure Michiko. The constant summoning of the sick and dead, those made most vulnerable by their reliance on the bounty of the sea for their subsistence, brought in other worlds into an otherwise modernized political scene in Japan.