Like thousands of others around the southern Japanese town of Minamata, fisherman Yoshio Mori's life was poisoned by mercury.
This week brought one solace - small, late but still significant. Japan's prime minister said he regretted the delay in bringing relief, and the governing parties pledged to pay for compensation.For Mori, 70, nothing will bring back the golden years just after World War II, when he prospered as a fisherman catching shrimp, crab and sea bass in the Shiranui Sea.
Then came the numbness in his limbs, and he watched as the flourishing fishing region he called home was devastated. Thousands of people fell victim to Minamata disease, many moving to far-off cities to escape the plague.
Beginning in 1932 and peaking in the 1950s, the chemical firm Chisso Corp. dumped mercury compounds into the sea around Minamata.
Fish ingested the mercury, and people ate the fish. In the early 1950s the horrors began: victims suffered uncontrollable spasms and wasted away until death; fetuses were poisoned in the womb and condemned to live with crippled limbs.
The tragedy became a worldwide symbol of environmental degradation, immortalized by W. Eugene Smith's 1971 photographs in Life magazine showing a mother cradling her cruelly deformed child in a bath.
Less famous is the legal struggle that Mori - who has never received compensation from Chisso or the Japanese government - and thousands of other victims have waged for 15 years.
The government has recognized 2,947 victims of Minamata disease, half of them still living. While Chisso is responsible for compensating them, the government has quietly helped by lending money to the nearly broke company so it can stay afloat and keep paying.
This week Japan's ruling coalition approved a plan to have the government guarantee compensation for previously unrecognized victims as well.
At least 4,300 other people and possibly thousands more will be eligible, according to Masashi Hiroki of the Environment Agency. Hi-ro-ki defended the government's reluctance until now to pay compensation, saying in many cases victims' symptoms were too vague to determine the cause.
The size of the payments, which would be made by Chisso using government money, remains to be determined, but would probably be in the tens of thousands of dollars per victim.
For many victims, the money is less important than a single word uttered by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama Thursday.
Murayama said it was "regrettable" that politicians had let the problem go unsolved for so many years. It was the first time a Japanese prime minister had admitted the government had something to be sorry for.