Some 60 pictures by a freelance photographer currently on display at a gallery in central Tokyo show glimpses of the half-century history of Minamata disease victims.

Since his first visit to Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, in 1960 as a rookie photographer just out of college, Shisei Kuwabara has pressed the shutter button around 30,000 times to record the lives of the people with the mercury-poisoning disease and their families.

The 60 photos have been chosen from the vast collection Kuwabara, now 77, took from 1960 to 2013.