In the 2nd June issue of "LIFE" magazine, American photojournalist Eugene Smith (1918-1978) published a photograph entitled "Death-Flow from a Pipe." The eerie photograph showed methylmercury wastewater from Chisso Corporation Minamata Factory forcibly discharged from a pipe into the sea.

    The photograph shocked the world in no small way. It is one of the most famous photographs Eugene Smith took in Minamata; the iconic drainpipe also appears in the movie MINAMATA (2020).
    The Chisso Corporation's Minamata Factory began manufacturing acetaldehyde from carbide and mercury on Saturday, 7th, May, 1932 and discharged the byproduct methylmercury wastewater into Minamata Bay through the factory gutter.
    As a result, many sufferers of methylmercury poisoning were found around the Minamata Bay area.
    On Tuesday, 9th September, 1958, Minamata Factory changed the drainage outlet from Minamata Bay to the Minamata River estuary, and that time they used a metal drainpipe. The purpose of discharging the wastewater into the Minamata River estuary was to dilute it in the whole Shiranui Sea.

    In 1958, the author of Minamata Bay, 1932 (Nihon Hyoronsha, 2012), Norio Iriguchi (then a sixth grader at Minamata First Elementary School) and friends saw the drainpipe several times at close quarters. It was a crude metal pipe that ran from the riverbank over a thin iron girder to the top of the stream, with a horizontal opening. Wastewater from the factory was discharged there from time to time. The drainpipe in the photograph taken by Eugene Smith was different from the one Norio Iriguchi and friends saw.

    In 1959, methylmercury poisoning sufferers were found in Tsunagi Village, Yunoura Town, and other areas in Ashikita County along the Shiranui Sea coast near the Minamata River estuary.
    Hearing that news, on Wednesday, 21st October, 1959, Takeo Akiyama - then in charge of the chemical industry at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) - instructed the president of Chisso Corporation, Kiichi Yoshioka, to "stop discharging wastewater into the Minamata River estuary and return it to Minamata Bay." The drainpipe at the Minamata River estuary was removed at the end of 1959.
    The effluent was again discharged through the factory gutter, without a pipe, into Minamata Bay, and it continued until Saturday, 18th May, 1968, when the Minamata Factory ceased production of acetaldehyde.

    Eugene and Aileen Smith arrived in Minamata for the first time in September 1971. It was more than ten years after Minamata Factory removed the drainpipe, and more than three years after it had stopped discharging methylmercury effluent anywhere. Therefore, it was impossible for Eugene Smith to have taken a photograph of the methylmercury wastewater discharged from the pipe into the sea.

    Eugene Smith's 1971 work, entitled "Death-Flow from a Pipe," is a photograph of water poured for land clearing at the Hachiman Pool, a man-made swamp that stored "white sewage" (carbide sludge, which did not contain methylmercury) about one kilometer north of Minamata Factory in the 1970s.