The arsenic milk disaster and a permanent framework for relief (1974)

When is responsibility complete?

The heart of this decision lay in how a company takes on responsibility for large-scale harm caused by its own product. Between the contamination and the disclosure there was an absence of inspection; in the fourteen years after the disclosure, forces worked to make the harm look smaller than it was. What broke that silence was the victims themselves, and the persistent investigation of the experts and citizens who stood beside them. That the acceptance of responsibility arrived not from the occurrence of the harm but only after society re-opened the question is the measure of how heavy this case is.

A framework in which the company that caused the harm carries relief in perpetuity was without precedent at the time, and has since been looked back on as one origin of Japan’s later product-liability law and consumer-protection debate. Yet lifetime relief takes on, as time passes, new symptoms and burdens no one could foresee at the outset. Disputes still running seventy years later leave open the question of how far a relief promise, once concluded, can keep pace with the reality of the harm. Does responsibility for the damage a company causes end when the agreement is signed, or does it stay in question for as long as the harm continues — the arsenic milk disaster still marks that boundary.