A district court has ordered the Niigata Municipal Government to officially recognize seven people as sufferers of the Minamata mercury-poisoning disease.
But the Niigata District Court also rejected the claims of two of the nine plaintiffs fighting for recognition over one of the country's worst outbreaks of illness linked to industrial pollution.
The ruling Monday was the first ever on people who specifically contracted the disease from mercury-tainted waste water that came out of a Showa Denko K.K. chemical plant in Niigata Prefecture in the 1960s.