Accepting the Itai-itai verdict: compensation, a pollution-control agreement and soil restoration (1972)

Taking responsibility as decades of involvement

To read this only as a company grudgingly paying up after losing a pollution suit is to miss what came after. Mitsui Kinzoku did not appeal to the Supreme Court; the day after the judgment it sat through eleven hours of negotiation at its head office and took on obligations with no visible end — compensation, annual on-site inspections, and a soil-restoration programme that would run thirty-three years. The character of the settlement shows less in the sum paid to the 506 plaintiffs than in its acceptance of a framework under which the victims would go on inspecting the operations of the Kamioka works, the source of the harm itself.

It would be hard, even so, to call it swift relief. The document settling the matter in full was exchanged forty-one years after the judgment, by which time only three of the 196 certified patients were still alive. The blow of the unpaid dividend in the year to March 1973 eased the following year, but pollution control kept drawing money from the Kamioka works, and environmental regulation remained a heavy constraint on management thereafter. That the responsibility for the harm had to be carried not as a single payment but as decades of continued involvement is what the nature of this problem reveals.