The No. 3 Petty Bench of the Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed an appeal by a group of Minamata mercury-poisoning victims and relatives of deceased victims who had accused the state and Kumamoto Prefecture of taking too long to provide them with recognition and benefits.
Presiding Justice Toshifumi Motohara upheld a Fukuoka High Court decision in 1996 that rejected a demand for damages by the 38 plaintiffs, saying the Kumamoto governor did his best to prevent a delay in the victims receiving official recognition.
Their defeat came more than 22 years after the compensation suit was first filed in 1978.
The plaintiffs demanded 84 million yen from Kumamoto Prefecture and the state for making them wait for up to nine years for benefits.
The plaintiffs had won compensation orders twice at lower courts, but the Supreme Court in 1991 ordered the Fukuoka High Court to rehear the case on grounds that the earlier rulings were based on "insufficient" court proceedings.
Official government compensation has been paid to Minamata disease victims since 1973, but many applicants had to wait years before gaining official recognition. The number of unprocessed applications reached more than 5,000 at one time. Thousands of local residents in Minamata developed symptoms of mercury poisoning between 1953 and 1960 after eating seafood contaminated by effluents from a Chisso Corp. chemical plant.
The symptoms of Minamata disease include numbness of the limbs, speech and mental disorders as well as mental retardation of children born to those poisoned.