Shinobu Sakamoto was just 15 when she left home in the Kumamoto Prefecture fishing village of Minamata to go to Stockholm and tell the world of the horrors of mercury poisoning.
Forty-five years on, she has flown overseas again, this time to Geneva, to attend a gathering Sunday of signatories to the first global pact to rein in mercury pollution.
Sakamoto is one of a shrinking group of survivors from the 1950s industrial disaster that left tens of thousands of people poisoned after toxic wastewater from a Chisso Corp. chemical plant seeped into Minamata Bay, polluting the region's food chain.