Green tourism in Minamata means touring areas of Minamata that have experienced Minamata disease; observing the ways in which citizens have implemented what they have learned from the Minamata incident in order to create a new Minamata; experiencing the ways a city lives with nature, a city which extends from watershed to river mouth, incorporating mountain villages, farming villages, fishing villages, and urban areas.
The city of Minamata was overwhelmed in the second half of the twentieth century by the disease, a manmade disaster. The pursuit of material and financial wealth polluted the natural world and destroyed the life and health of those whose lives were closely tied to nature.
This city, Minamata, is attempting to reconstruct the damaged links between nature and people, and among its people themselves.
Minamata has a river that links mountains and sea. In the various districts it drains, the residents have carried out cooperative investigations of the ways their own lives are tied to the blessings of water and nature: the course of the water they use, their ways of using and eating plants, and their gods of the mountains and of water. Through their rediscovery of the blessings and joys nature brings to their lives, they are beginning to build lives based on more than just material wealth.
Through experiencing with residents their daily life and the nature that surrounds it, green tourism in Minamata offers a new vision. This is the hope Minamata holds for the future; it is the great dream of creating "another kind of world," that has inspired the work of Soshisha from its establishment.