Why Did the “Blue-Green Coalition” Develop in the Case of Minamata? an Analysis of the Struggles of the Union and Social Movements Against Chisso

From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, there was an upsurge of social movements against industrial pollution.  Victims of pollution diseases as well as local residents organized anti-pollution movements and opposed the construction of pollution-prone plants in their neighborhoods.  Reactions of labor unions to these social movements were indifferent or even hostile. Some enterprise unions supported activities of residents against pollution in principle but withdrew their support when the latter’s actions, such as filing lawsuits against polluters, came in direct conflict with the interests of unions and their firms.  Other unions at firms that caused industrial pollution stood on the management side and took confrontational attitudes toward local resident social movements. 

The paper examines an outlier case of this general tendency (the absence of “blue-green coalitions”), by focusing on the relationship between the enterprise union of Chisso (the SNU) and social movements of pollution victims and their supporters.  When it became clear in 1968 that organic mercury discharges from Chisso’s Minamata plant caused Minamata disease, the SNU became actively involved in supporting Minamata disease patients and formed cooperative relations with social movement groups concerned with Minamata disease.  The paper explores the factors contributing to the formation and development of this “blue-green coalition” and what concrete results the coalition achieved from the perspective of “strategic capacity” of union leaders.  The paper argues that the SNU developed its strategic capacity as it coped with challenges posed by hardline management policy toward the union and management plans to drastically downsize Minamata plant.  Union leaders developed the strategic capacity to frame the mutual interests of union members and Minamata disease victims by identifying the management of Chisso as their common opponent in their respective struggles and to mobilize the union’s resources effectively in cooperation with social movement organizations in the struggles against the company.