Minamata is a coastal town in Kumamoto Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan. It is also the name given to a disease caused by mercury poisoning. For more than three decades, from the 1930s until the 1960s, a chemical factory owned by the Chisso Corporation released methylmercury into the Shiranui Sea near Minamata, causing severe illness, death, and widespread suffering among the local population. Minamata is generally considered one of Japan's four big modern pollution scandals, and it continues to capture the imagination of environmental activists, artists, film directors, and academics. A World Otherwise is the latest in a series of English-language monographs on Minamata, toxic waste, and environmental activism. It builds upon the scholarship of such historians as Timothy George, Brett Walker, and Simon Avenell,Footnote ¹ but offers a number of new perspectives. Unlike these other authors, Yuki Miyamoto is not an environmental historian, but an ethicist. Accordingly, her book focuses on moral, philosophical, and, to a certain extent, religious questions—rather than, say, ecological impact or political decision-making.

A World Otherwise centers on an advocacy group called Hongan no Kai (Association of the Original Vow) and presents the ideas of some of its most prominent members: Sugimoto Eiko, Ogata Masato, and the well-known author Ishimure Michiko. The organization's name, publications, and ritual practices all have a decidedly Buddhist feel to them, but it is not a religious organization (shūkyō hōjin), legally speaking, and its members deny that they are “religious.” Miyamoto, however, suggests that the group does express a “distinct religious sensibility,” which, according to her, “offers a model for the practice of countering the ‘modern’ attitude that . . . has given rise to conditions leading to environmental disaster” (p. xi). The purpose of the book, then, is to “articulate the group's vision of a world in which relationships between humans, their environment, and each other are conceived differently from those that prevail in the modern, industrialized world” (p. xi). Drawing on the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas as well as the writings of Hongan no Kai members, Miyamoto refers to this vision of an alternative ontology and ethics as “a world otherwise”—a translation of janaka shaba, a phrase from the local dialect of Minamata (p. 6).

The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of janaka shaba and provides some relevant historical and theoretical context. Miyamoto brings together insights from scholars such as Judith Butler (on precarity), Jane Bennett (on nonhuman agency), and Frédérique Apffel-Marglin (on spirituality and rituals) and links these to the work of Hongan no Kai members. I would have liked the author to elaborate further upon these topics in chapter 2. Instead, in the second chapter, the reader is presented with a historical essay on the founder of Chisso, Noguchi Shitagau, and on the related processes of electrification, modernization, and colonization. This is typical of the book as a whole: Miyamoto touches upon various fascinating topics and theories, but she has a meandering style, and some of the topics that she mentions in passing would have deserved a more focused and in-depth analysis.

Chapter 3 introduces readers to the popular beliefs of fishing communities in modern Japan. It also raises difficult ethical questions surrounding violence, responsibility, and forgiveness. The chapter centers on Sugimoto Eiko and her family, who suffered not only from Minamata disease but also from discrimination and harassment by fellow community members. Miyamoto describes how the Sugimotos came to conceptualize their situation not as victimhood, but as nosari, a “gift”—and how, by doing so, they found acceptance and apparently succeeded in forgiving those who had mistreated them.

Similar topics are explored in chapter 4, which focuses on the ideas of Ogata Masato. Here, Miyamoto asks why the activist Ogata, an important spokesperson for Minamata sufferers, at some point decided to withdraw from the lawsuit. According to Miyamoto, Ogata was disappointed that his “vision of justice—the restoration of relationships among and between humans and their surroundings—remained unaddressed in court,” and believed “the assumption of responsibility for irreparable damage to be ultimately impossible” (p. 72).

Miyamoto compares Ogata's ideas with the moral philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, who argued that law cannot be equated with morality, and that “judgments of the law . . . do not and cannot realize truth and justice” (p. 66). This strikes me as a rather controversial statement, and indeed a morally and politically problematic one—for if we accept that law is separate from justice, what other options for justice are we left with? Likewise, drawing on Bennett's ideas about “distributed agency” and argument that we should be hesitant to “assign singular blame,” Miyamoto suggests that Minamata constitutes a form of “systemic violence in which no one is innocent and everyone is culprit” (p. 68). To me, such a statement seems to deny the fundamental power inequality between Chisso, the corporation that inflicted the violence upon human and nonhuman inhabitants of Minamata, and the fishers and workers whose lives and livelihoods were threatened. In other words: if everything is systemic, and if corporations merely “epitomize the other systems in our society” (p. 73), does this mean that corporate actors and leaders cannot be held legally accountable? What are the consequences of such a logic for the ecocides committed by powerful corporate actors today, such as the fossil fuel corporations that have prevented meaningful climate action for decades? In sum, chapter 4 is rich and thought-provoking, but I find its conclusions unsatisfactory, and I struggle to see the subversive potential of Ogata's “world otherwise” if it means that corporate violence and environmental destruction remain unpunished.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the work of Ishimure Michiko, author of the famous book on Minamata Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow (Kugai jōdo). It starts with a somewhat off-topic defense of religion in the face of simplistic popular media accusations of religion as “irrational” and “violent.” I agree with Miyamoto here, of course, and I think the same applies to most of her readers, which raises a question: who is she trying to convince here, and why is this section necessary in a book on an organization that does not even self-identify as religious? The rest of the chapter is more relevant, providing a biographical account of Ishimure's life and work. This lays the foundation for chapter 6, which discusses Ishimure's writing in more detail, focusing on its “mythopoetic” and “enchanted” character. This is one of the chapters I enjoyed the most. I was fascinated by Miyamoto's discussion of the “power of place” in Ishimure's work and her notion of “hometown” not so much as a physical location, but rather as a vision of a “world otherwise,” an enchanted “conglomerate of assemblages” that includes humans, nonhuman animals and plants, landscapes, and spirits (the comparison with Yi-Fu Tuan's work is apt, I think). Such a notion of hometown is profoundly different from the nationalist furusato imagery propagated by the state and commercial enterprises, as Miyamoto rightly points out (p. 114).

Finally, chapter 7 addresses a topic that will be of interest to scholars of religion and social anthropologists: the ritual innovations and practices of Hongan no Kai. It is a fascinating chapter, and my only point of critique is that it should have come much earlier in the book, because it is not until this chapter that the reader finally understands what type of organization Hongan no Kai actually is—that is, not just the ideas it represents, but the things it does. It is here that we learn about the fascinating case of the Minamata survivors who decided to bring the spirits of the departed by ship from Kyushu to a photo exhibition in Tokyo and conduct a ritual for their benefit (shukkongi) there, which the exhibition organizers declined to attend because it was “too religious.” This raises many interesting questions about the ambivalent nature of Hongan no Kai—not fully religious, but not entirely secular, either—and how it challenges the state-religion dichotomy by performing nondenominational rituals for the spirits of victims of corporate violence in secular spaces.

We also read about the ways in which Hongan no Kai members have appropriated the sanitized, secular space of the so-called Eco Park in Minamata: a “manicured park” on the site of “a massive graveyard” in Minamata (p. 137). After negotiating with the local authorities, Hongan no Kai members succeeded in getting permission not only to cultivate indigenous plants without artificial fertilizers, but also to place numerous tamashii ishi (spirit stones) in commemoration of the victims of Minamata disease. Initially, most of these statues represented the bodhisattva Jizō, but these are now accompanied by statues of Ebisu, Bodhidharma, the Virgin Mary, a cat, and Totoro (p. 138). Thus, Hongan no Kai has creatively reappropriated Eco Park, turning it into an inclusive, more-than-human space of commemoration, rather than a space of denial.

A World Otherwise is a fascinating book. I thoroughly enjoyed chapters 1, 6, and 7. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 were informative, if somewhat unbalanced. I was provoked by chapter 4 and disagreed with its conclusions. All in all, I very much enjoyed reading this book, as it is rich and provides much food for thought, even though I think it should have been structured differently. It is a welcome addition to the existing scholarship on Minamata, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in environmental issues in Japan—not only philosophers, but also scholars of religion, literature, and anthropology.