“Now I am Become Death”: Japanese and Canadian Industrial Contamination in Michiko Ishimure’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease and Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada and Japan share a history of industrial contamination that has resulted in mercury poisoning; the inhabitants of both Minamata, Japan and the Indigenous community of Grassy Narrows, Ontario have suffered from what would come to be known as Minamata disease. Environmental activists, proponents of industrial progress, individuals in the affected communities, and novelists Michiko Ishimure and Thomas King discuss and weigh the possibilities of economic and material progress against the problems of environmental degradation and industrial contamination leading to disease and death for humans and ecosystems. This paper will show how Ishimure and King discuss the possibility of hope and renewal through the tourist industry, but will also question the efficacy of “dark tourism.” Is it possible to balance an ethics of care and respect for those whose lives have been destroyed by industrial contamination with the need of those who remain to make a living through tourism? This paper will explore the fictional possibility offered by King alongside the actual recovery and tourist industry generated in the aftermath of the Minamata poisoning and subsequent clean up efforts. Is it possible to reimagine and reclaim industrial wreckage as sites of pleasure and recreation? Do these regenerated sites of industrial destruction promote the common good or further victimize the individuals and communities destroyed in the name of progress?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".