First Arrest Made Linking Yakuza with Fukushima Nuclear Clean-Up Crews

[dixiegrrrrl]

(and the hits just keep coming)

In the first arrest in relation to the yakuza's role in Japan's nuclear industry since last March's devastating earthquake and tsunami, police in Fukushima charged a senior yakuza leader for illegally dispatching workers to the reconstruction at the TEPCO-run Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant. According to reports by Sankei Shinbun and other sources, the Organized Crime Control Division has arrested a senior boss of the Sumiyoshi-kai (住吉会 who dispatched men, including yakuza members to a construction subcontractor in Tochigi Prefecture, and these men were sent into the nuclear plant area where they allegedly participated in containment work for the damaged facilities.

The charges pertain to labor dispatches from May to the end of July last year. The labor dispatch laws forbid dispatching workers to construction sites. Japan’s nuclear industry has long been fraught with yakuza connections which we first wrote about last June.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/06/tepco-will-someone-turn-lights/39364/
TEPCO is not the only nuclear power plant operator in Japan to get in trouble for using yakuza-supplied labor.
KEPCO (Kansai Electric Power Company) also had workers illegally supplied by a Kudo-kai front company working at their Ooi Nuclear Power Plant. A Fukuoka Police investigation in January uncovered the problem. The Kudo-kai is an extremely violent yakuza group based in Kyushu, and like other southern Japan gangs they are known for their fondness of pineapples. ( their slang for hand grenades)
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/05/first-arrest-made-linking-yakuza-fukushima-nuclear-clean-crews/52649/

[Demeter]

1. There's so much about Japan

that too many people are too polite to mention. This is two of them, maybe three.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. As I read more about Tepco & yakuza,

it gets worse, and one of the reasons the Japanese Gov't finally nationalized Tepco.

TEPCO has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the nation of Japan: cronyism, collusion, gentrification, corruption, weak regulation, and entropy. Despite being in the spotlight for the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, TEPCO continues to engage in questionable labor practices, and has escaped bankruptcy in closed-door meetings with politicians, and through denying culpability has shifted part of the reparations burden onto taxpayers – deeds which testify to the extent to which TEPCO still has plenty of political power, if not as much nuclear power.

After an expose in the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun, last week TEPCO admitted that 69 of its plant workers can’t be located for radiation checks—30 of them were found not even to have had their names recorded. This raises questions about how these workers were recruited, paid, monitored for radiation exposure, or vetted before entering the site of the nuclear disaster. Former and current workers within the plant testify that many of the hired hands are yakuza or ex-yakuza members. One company supplying the firm with contract workers is a known Japanese mafia front company. TEPCO when questioned would only say, “We don’t have knowledge of who is ultimately supplying the labor at the end of the outsourcing. We do not have organized crime exclusionary clauses in our standard contracts but are considering it.” The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) has asked the company to “submit a report” on the matter.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/06/tepco-will-someone-turn-lights/39364/

[kristopher]

3. Have you ever been to Jake Adelstein's website?

http://www.japansubculture.com/author/jakeadelstein/

We went to college together in Japan where he got his start putting out the school newspaper. In my experience is extremely intelligent, very, very ethical, and tenacious as a bulldog. I say that because some of the stuff he writes tends to attract a lot of criticism directed at discrediting him.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. What a co-incidence!

I found this morning as I was reading about Tepco and yakuza.
And booked marked it under my Fukishima folder.
I am very seriously envious of your being in Japan...one of my few unfullfilled "want to's" this time around.