You remember Minamata, don’t you?
An archive can keep the memories of harm present over time, whether anyone answers for it depends on who can be held to account.
[I swear] By time / that humanity is in [a grave state of] loss / except those who have faith, do good, and urge each other to the truth, and urge each other to perseverance.”
Quran, Surah Al-’Asr (103)
Some losses can’t be prevented. Time takes people, places and things from us, and societies have found ways of living with that. There is another kind of loss, that which is done by others. And it is different because it can be avoided. Harm is done by people, and its consequences can be changed by the same fallible, finite actions that produced it. The surah is a reminder for us to reflect on this question: How are we using the time we have? What do we do with it, together? When we think about harm, those answers take shape: we can remember what happened, we can keep a record of it, and we can build institutions with rules designed to change people’s lives after traumatic events.
We can combine those efforts to stop harm from being repeated. Three specific factors must be in place: how we remember something that happened, how we keep those memories over time, and what we do with them. A delicate structure of memory, archive and power, which we call a Triangle of Remembrance. Memory relates to witnessing, recognizing and deciding if something that happens matters. The archive is the technological link that allows recognition to outlive witnesses, any kind of record that keeps an event available much longer than the people who lived it. Power is the capacity to act on the remains of those events.
Institutions, laws, or organized communities can turn records into consequences, reparations and the guarantee of no repetition. Removing any one point makes the triangle collapse. Memory without means to be preserved fades quickly. An archive without power to act becomes decoration. Power without memory can rewrite its own version of events without accountability. The collapse of this triangle is how harm gets repeated, and its most common face is that of someone who remembers, documents, and has the means to act, but isn’t obliged to care.
Few cases show the whole triangle, built imperfectly over decades, like that of Minamata. At its center there’s a quieter and less celebrated work than the verdicts and treaties it fed: the labor of the photographers who kept the archive from dissolving.
Resisting loss at scale: Minamata Photographers’ Eye
The disease began with an ordinary industrial process. In 1932, Chisso’s factory in Minamata produced acetaldehyde, a building block of plastics, and released methylmercury into the sea as a by-product without any supervision. For about 24 years, families ate fish that looked, smelled, and tasted as usual, but in May 1956, doctors at the company’s own hospital reported two sisters with a neurological illness nobody could explain. Kumamoto University traced it to contaminated seafood that same year and confirmed methylmercury as the cause by 1959. Chisso stopped making acetaldehyde in May 1968, once the process had become obsolete, and the government formally recognized the cause in September of that year, twelve years after the first report, and 36 years after the environmental outbreak.
Victims had to fight for accountability, but photographs made evidence hard to dismiss. In 1973 a court ruled in the patients’ favor, which was followed by a compensation agreement. More than 70,000 people have received some compensation or medical support since then, and Minamata was used to name a global mercury treaty that takes place every two years.
However, over half a century after researchers identified methylmercury as the culprit of the disease, victims have to keep kicking the can: In 2023 the Osaka District Court recognized 128 plaintiffs as Minamata victims beyond the state’s own criteria, and the central government, Kumamoto Prefecture and Chisso all appealed. Subsequent rulings have been mixed, and nearly 1,800 people across Japan are still in court, many of them elderly, still seeking recognition.
The Minamata Photographers’ Eye Project compiles thousands of images documented by nine photographers: Aileen M. Smith (along with her late husband’s work W. Eugene Smith), Shiota Takeshi, Kuwabara Shisei, Miyamoto Shigemi, Ishikawa Takeshi, Tanaka Fumiko, Kitaoka Hideo, Koshiba Kazuyoshi, Akutagawa Jin. These photographers registered six decades of consequences of mercury pollution that poisoned thousands of people in the coasts of Minamata, Japan. Their images are an ever-present testimony of a crisis that still lingers and that is still happening in other parts of the world. Their work helps explain why this specific kind of poisoning ended up having its own name: the Minamata disease.
They lived and witnessed the disease over decades. The project started four years ago with the shared goal of preserving more than 200,000 items of original film, prints, and digital data. Beyond the sheer beauty of the artistic work, its importance is practical more than it is symbolic. The project has had to deal with degrading film, copyright negotiations with authors’ heirs that would prefer to keep their personal archives private, and disperse family records, in a race to preserve the memory before it fades.
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The project treats preservation as an act of responsibility, as it is also built to keep the material in use through exhibitions, workshops, and education, making sure the archive stays a public resource. In terms of the triangle, it works as the archive’s custodian, the point that most often goes unfunded and unseen.
Were it not for the fact that there are still victims and witnesses still carrying the weight of not being compensated more than 80 years after the initial event, both the JNC Corporation and the Japanese State would have just ignored what happened. The archival and the memory parts of the Triangle of Remembrance show how witnessing, telling and listening to the story isn’t enough to stop harm. The Triangle is balanced out by power that ensures there’s no future harm. And power requires transparency and a will to act, as opacity and lack of action is what enabled Chisso to go decades without consequences.
Who answers?
The Japanese case shows a single point of accountability: methylmercury came from one factory, spilled into one bay, and harmed communities in a specific geography that was consistently named and photographed. Courts had jurisdiction over the company. Patients organized, found lawyers, and sued, getting a court ruling in 1973. A political settlement followed in the mid-1990s, once legal victories made the government’s position untenable. It shows how none of it was quick and what accountability needs: a defendant who can be reached, a court willing to hear the case, and people backing witnesses.
In 2013, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) marked the start of a landmark document: the Minamata Convention, a globally binding, voluntary agreement, designed to protect human health and the environment from mercury related emissions. A place that spent almost forty years being ignored became the word governments use when they promise not to do it again. But these promises lack enforcement and consequences, the elements that make the reality of no repetition possible. These treaties work only where governments report honestly, implement their plans, and accept scrutiny in good faith when they don’t. Memory and archives allowed institutions to use the name, but no one is really ever obliged to answer for the harm, which can happen again.
Now picture this: an armed group forces an Indigenous community or brings migrants to dredge gold from a riverbed using mercury. The poison enters the water in one country, then settles into fish that migrate for thousands of kilometers across the basin. Downstream, in another country, other people who have never seen the mine eat that fish. Years later, they show signs of Minamata disease. They can’t say why, or who. Different countries, different legal systems, different victims, one systemic issue driven by external pressures like the unrelenting gold price. Here the triangle fails at every point. No one can safely testify, no one holds the evidence, and no court has reach.
In the Amazonian countries there is no lack of testimony. Communities along these rivers have said what is happening to them, and researchers have measured and keep measuring it. What is missing is someone obliged to answer. Gold mining is the largest source of human mercury emissions in the world, pointing to small-scale mining at about 38% of the total. This practice, which in the Amazon is everything but small-scale, now feeds security and legal crises in country after country, Colombia, Perú, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana and Surinam.
How can we strengthen the Triangle of Remembrance?
If we can take something from the mercury poisoning of the Amazon is that more testimony isn’t the answer. Witnesses are extorted or killed, testimonies are ignored, statements are disputed, archives can be destroyed, reports can be shelved or falsified, and a file can be silently edited. Whoever is supposed to answer has always had a way out. What could potentially change the situation is a record that no single party controls, so that no single party can tamper with it or pressure someone else into doing it. A record that is fed by multiple stakeholders and not just a single jurisdiction.
Blockchain provides the possibility of a transparent system by design that helps make records public, verifiable by anyone (with the technical expertise), and uneditable without leaving a trace. We did a deep dive into this issue on our first report. We now have a technology that makes documenting everything permanently easier, and a system that aims to have better incentives. The network rewards honesty, and anyone who attaches their name to a claim builds a checkable track record, which makes falsified input costly. Blockchain helps remove comfortable excuses like not knowing, as the archive is public. Once a record is open, choosing not to act becomes evident.
Using a trustless permanent tamper-proof ledger is a technological solution that makes the unbalance poised by opacity harder to sustain. Blockchain can’t make a claim true nor can it create political will, but it helps make political inaction unsustainable, similar to what happened with the Japanese State. It doesn’t solve the lack of political will, but it unmasks its unwillingness to cooperate, and it makes political drive easier to build by victims and witnesses.
The Minamata Photographers’ archive shows us that a record kept long enough can reach a court and help victims claim justice. With an archive well preserved and the political drive to use it, we don’t have to ask ourselves if we remember something happened and how it’s being told to later generations; we must ask each other if we’re working to actually avoid harm from happening again or willingly ignoring it ever happened.
Every month, The Lighthouse will cover a core element of our reports, examining across radically different contexts how technology is interacting with and modifying our lives. If you enjoyed this issue, we invite you to read our latest report where we explore gold markets through the lens of decentralized traceability with a detailed case study on illegal mining in the Amazon.
