On Tuesday, March 1, Momoko and I arrived in the town of Minamata, which sits on the Yatsushiro Sea in deep southern Japan, quite a departure from Tokyo. It would be something like a first-time Japanese visitor to the States going from New York to Gulfport, Mississippi.
Minamata’s seaside mountains were a bigger presence than I had imagined they would be. Mist and fog hung in the valleys and a cold, stiff breeze greeted us when we rolled in. We found the Super Hotel in the center of town, dropped off our bags, and wandered around. At three in the afternoon, the streets were vacant, except for children walking home from school in uniforms, with raincoats and backpacks, and numerous alley cats. We had no map or directions and yet had no trouble finding the front gate of the massive industrial complex of Chisso, the company that dumped mercury waste into Minamata Bay for several decades in early and midcentury, poisoning the fish that had long been the lifeblood of the area. The toxins from these fish affected the wombs of pregnant women, resulting in several thousand (at least) deformed babies. Later in the week we were told, “The babies absorbed all the poison and saved the adults.”
The next day, Takeshi Ishikawa, now age sixty, flew down from Tokyo to join us. In 1971, Ishikawa was a photography student in Tokyo when Smith’s exhibition Let Truth Be the Prejudice opened in a Shinjuku department store. Ishikawa saw publicity portraits of Smith and one day noticed him walking down the street. He approached Smith, and, though Ishikawa spoke little English, ended up spending three years working with Gene and Aileen in Minamata, documenting the effects of Minamata disease. He remains close to Aileen today, and she vouched for me (she had intended to meet us in Minamata but at the last minute couldn’t make it). Ishikawa dropped everything and spent three days with us.
Ishikawa grew up in a family of rice farmers in rural Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku, the smallest and least populated of the four major islands of Japan, about five hundred miles southwest of Tokyo. Painting first drew his interest, then design, but the gadgetry and handcraft of photography took hold. His kindness and sincerity give him a childlike quality: he’s quick to laugh and quick to become misty-eyed, especially when talking about Smith’s compassion and generosity. People in Minamata lit up when they saw him, including disease victims he’d known for forty years. By our last day together, communicating almost entirely through Momoko, it was as though the three of us had known one another for a very long time.
“Mr. Ishikawa might be the oldest person I know who could feel like a brother to me,” wrote Momoko to me later. “One memorable time in Minamata, I caught a glimpse of the boy in him. He had been arranging a casual dinner with some disease victims and care workers, who were old friends of his. You and I were planning to go to the dinner at first, but the exhaustion of the previous two weeks had caught up with us, and we were seeing the same group the next day anyway, so we decided to give it a miss. When I told Mr. Ishikawa that we were passing on the dinner, I remember vividly the look on his face. We had burst his bubble. He was increasingly shaken by each word I spoke, like a plant that sways in resistance as heavy raindrops roll off its leaves one by one. After some struggle, he was able to summon a mature voice of understanding. He hadn’t told everybody that we would be there, so it wasn’t that he feared people would be offended or upset. He just really liked the idea of everybody getting together, friends old and new, having a nice meal and some drinks. But the next morning when I caught up with him at breakfast, he seemed to have already forgotten about it. He was looking forward to the day ahead with us.”
Ishikawa took us to see the tiny plot of land where Gene and Aileen had lived in Minamata. He had stayed there, too, for a short time, before moving to another house close by, where he set up a darkroom for Smith. For years after the project was completed and the Smiths had moved away, there was a sign out front indicating “Eugene Smith’s House.”
About one hundred yards from the house, with railroad tracks running in between, there is a neighborhood store run by the Mizoguchi family. Smith bought a fifth of Suntory Red whiskey and ten bottles of milk there every day. Ishikawa sometimes ran that errand. The same family still owns the store. We went in, and Ishikawa asked Mr. Mizoguchi if he remembered Smith. Momoko told me he began talking about Smith casually, as if he still lived there. Mr. Mizoguchi’s wife disappeared into their house and emerged with a scrapbook that featured two vintage prints given to them by Smith as gifts. The prints, simple pictures of neighborhood cats, bore his trademark warmth and range of black and white tones. It was better than looking at his prints in a museum. Mr. Mizoguchi picked up the phone to call people who would remember Smith. We met with one of them, Takeru Uchigami, the next day. Smith had photographed his wedding, and the picture made it into the eventual book Minamata.
After the visit to the store, Ishikawa called a taxi so we could head back to the hotel. The dispatcher knew our location when Ishikawa said, Eugene Smith’s house. In the taxi to the hotel, he said, I always knew that Gene and Aileen would never last as a couple. It wasn’t healthy. Gene drank all the time, he wasn’t in good shape, and they fought a lot. For some reason, it felt like they pretended to get along in front of me. Even after they returned to New York, once I went to visit them and they were separated by this point, but they didn’t tell me. They pretended to still be together just for me. It was like they didn’t want to disappoint me or something.
Later that night, we had dinner with seventy-six-year-old Kyoko Mizoguchi (no relation to the store owners), whose family owned the house in which Smith and Aileen lived. Kyoko’s sister Junko, twelve years her junior, maintained a crush on Ishikawa at the time. They shared laughs about what might have been. Kyoko had another younger sister, Toyoko, who died of Minamata disease at age eight. When Kyoko was very young, before Junko and Toyoko were born, she often went fishing for the family dinner. Mercury-infected fish swam slower and closer to the water’s surface, Kyoko said, making them easy catches. She described coming home with baskets of fish, to the delight of her parents.
When Gene and Aileen Smith moved into the house of Kyoko’s family, there was a shrine to Toyoko installed in the main room. They didn’t take it down. In a picture of that room by Smith, you can see the shrine in the background, and Ishikawa faces the camera. Aileen sits at the opposite end of the table in a striped robe.
Toward the end of dinner with Kyoko, she used the word yurei, “ghosts,” to describe Momoko and me, ghosts of Gene and Aileen, she said. The comments came with warm tears in her eyes. The next morning, Ishikawa, Momoko, and I visited Kyoko’s house to look at some of her pictures and other tokens from the early 1970s when Gene and Aileen were there. Again, she called Momoko and me ghosts. Then she used the same term Shimakawa used, reikon, the spirit that departs the body after death and continues to exist, often becoming a benevolent ancestor, or a yurei. When we said goodbye and walked down the narrow street away from her house, Kyoko stood outside and cried. She waved until we were out of sight.
* * *
When I conduct oral history interviews, I don’t use a script. I prepare at length, and questions arise naturally, but I purposefully don’t use a list. This method can mean forgetting to ask something important. But it’s worth the risk because it also can enable an unusually emotional and revealing exchange, something real. My father, a doctor of internal and family medicine in my small hometown, Washington, on the coast of North Carolina, always said, “If you listen to patients long enough, they will tell you exactly what is wrong with them.”
In the late 1990s, I attended a talk by the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who put it this way: “If you ask a question, you’ll get an answer to that question. But sometimes if you just sit there silently for long enough you’ll get answers to questions you wouldn’t know how to ask.”
This method can baffle some. Once I interviewed the jazz bassist Butch Warren in the offices of NBC News in Washington, D.C., down the hall from the studio of Meet the Press. Warren was from D.C. and had moved back there during a long disappearance not unlike Ronnie Free’s. He’d played in Monk’s bands that rehearsed in Smith’s loft in 1963 and 1964 and he was also a comrade and occasional bandmate of Sonny Clark’s. There were specific things I wanted to ask him, but I also wanted to develop a trust with him. I like to begin a process of building trust by asking a subject about their parents and grandparents. A simple question like that can trigger a conversation that never really stops. It can get emotional. An interview expected to last an hour can go on for a long time, even months and years. In the interview with Warren, I never came anywhere close to that. Two high-level NBC staffers for Meet the Press sat in on the interview (they were generous enough to have arranged it—Warren didn’t have a telephone at the time) and they seemed dumbfounded by this method. They felt awkward, squirmed, paced restlessly around the back of the room, appeared to feel uncomfortable for me and for Warren, and jumped into the space I left open.
* * *
Before my trip to Japan, I’d never tried this method of interviewing through an interpreter and I never considered any emotional consequences of relying on Momoko’s ears and voice to act as mine.
Each morning we met for breakfast in our hotel. She’d arrive with a list of questions and comments she’d jotted down overnight. We’d go over everything and prepare for the day ahead. She would make whatever phone calls and send whatever texts or e-mails were necessary. Then we’d make our way to new locations and listen to personal and often intimate stories.
Momoko had never done anything like this but her experiences growing up on three continents made her good for this line of work, adaptable and street-smart. It was clear she earned the trust of a variety of people on our trip. Meanwhile, I’d never felt this level of dependency in my adult life.
By the time we were in Minamata, when Kyoko was calling us ghosts of Gene and Aileen, I was caught off guard by feelings that had grown powerful and unsettling. On a long-planned journey halfway around the world, I was following Smith’s footsteps on a level unrealized.