is a Japanese documentary made in 1975 by

Noriaki Tsuchimoto (11 December 1928, in Gifu Prefecture, Japan – 24 June 2008) was a Japanese documentary film director known for his films on Minamata disease and examinations of the effects of modernization on Asia. Tsuchimoto and Shinsuke Ogawa have been ...

. It is the fourth in a series of independent documentaries that Tsuchimoto made of the mercury poisoning incident in

Minamata is a city located in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. It is on the west coast of Kyūshū and faces Amakusa islands. Minamata was established as a village in 1889, re-designated as a town in 1912 and grew into a city in 1949. As of March 2017, the ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

Film content

Four years after '' Minamata: The Victims and Their World'', Tsuchimoto's camera focuses on the everyday lives of the victims of mercury poisoning. Fisherman still knowingly catch and eat the mercury-laden fish caught in the beautiful

Shiranui Sea The , which is also called the , is a shallow semi-enclosed inland sea separating the island of Kyūshū from the Amakusa Islands. It lies mostly within Kumamoto Prefecture and at the southern end of the sea it also borders Kagoshima Prefecture. ...

because that is what they have always done and that is how they relate to nature. Some patients who received significant compensation from Chisso, the polluter, may now live in good houses, but without doing work their lives seem somehow empty. The real victims remain the children, who are now getting older and in some cases increasingly conscious of the fact they are different from other children.

Reception

The film scholar Justin Jesty wrote that ''The Shiranui Sea'' is "the crowning achievement of Tsuchimoto's first five years of engagement with mercury poisoning. The film is a long and powerful meditation on the depth and breadth of the tragedy." The documentarist Makoto Satō called ''The Shiranui Sea'' "the ultimate masterpiece" of Tsuchimoto's Minamata films; and the filmmaker John Gianvito selected it as one of the ten best films of all time in the 2012 ''

Sight and Sound ''Sight and Sound'' (also spelled ''Sight & Sound'') is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). It conducts the well-known, once-a-decade ''Sight and Sound'' Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time, ongoing ...

'' poll.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Shiranui Sea, The 1975 films 1975 in the environment 1975 documentary films Documentary films about environmental issues Documentary films about health care Japanese documentary films 1970s Japanese-language films 1970s political films Mercury poisoning Films directed by Noriaki Tsuchimoto 1970s Japanese films