On 22 March 2011, an exhausting court battle finally ended for over 2000 victims of mercury poisoning in Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectures. In sum, the agreement, decades in the making, was as follows as outlines in the Japan Times (31 March): “Chisso will provide some 90 percent of the plaintiffs with a ¥2.1 million lump sum each as well as a ¥2.29 billion fund, and the central and prefectural governments will shoulder part of their medical costs.” Chisso Corporation's dumping of methyl-mercury in nearby waters caused Minamata disease, as the painful ailment came to be known after it was first recognized in 1956. Half a century later, time is running out for these victims to receive the official recognition they deserve, as their bodies are growing increasingly frail. The mercury that poisoned their bodies was carried through the fish they ate and accumulated as it moved up the trophic tiers in a process called biomagnifications. In this process persistent poisons, such as mercury, concentrate in the upper echelons of the food chain. In biomagnification, organisms at the top of the chain carry higher levels of toxicity in their fatty tissues.

Watanabe Norihiko is pointing to his home, 600 meters from what he calls the most dangerous nuclear power complex on the planet. “There's nothing like it anywhere in the world,” he says, eyes widening. “If it blows up, we're all finished.”

Strong in the Rain, a new book co-authored by Japan Focus coordinator David McNeill and Lucy Birmingham, Time magazine's Tokyo reporter, tells the story of Japan's 2001 triple disaster through the eyes of six ordinary Japanese people. The books follows the six – a housewife, a fisherman, the mayor of the coastal city of Minamisoma, a student, a foreign teacher and a maintenance worker at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as they deal first with the shock of the initial earthquake and tsunami, then the horrific consequences of the nuclear disaster. In this except from Chapter Four, plant worker Watanabe Kai (a pseudonym) and Mayor Sakurai Katsunobu begin to realize the full scale of the triple meltdown at the Daiichi plant and what it will mean for their lives.

Listen to an interview with David McNeill on RTE Radio, Ireland.