Fukushima Fraud and Corruption: Japanese Organized Crime Involved in Recruitment of “Specialized Personnel”
The crisis in Japan has been described as “a nuclear war without a war”. In the words of renowned novelist Haruki Murakami:
“This time no one dropped a bomb on us … We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives.”Several Global Research reports and background articles have outlined the dangers of Worldwide radiation resulting from the Fukushima disaster.
This disaster is now being sustained and aggravated by the incompetence of TEPCO as well as political camouflage by the Abe government.
Fukushima and the Yakuza
There is another dimension: The coordination of the multibillion dollar Fukushima decontamination operation relies on Japan’s organized crime, the Yakusa, which is actively involved in the recruitment of “specialized” personnel for dangerous tasks.
“The complexity of Fukushima contracts
and the shortage of workers have played into the hands of the yakuza,
Japan’s organized crime syndicates, which have run labor rackets for
generations.” (Reuters, October 25, 2013)
The Yakuza labor practices at Fukushima are based on a corrupt system
of subcontracting, which does not favor the hiring of competent
specialized personnel. It creates an environment of fraud and
incompetence, which in the case of Fukushima could have devastating
consequences. The subcontracting with organized crime syndicates is a
means for major corporations involved in the clean-up to significantly
reduce their labor costs.Fukushima in the wake of the Tsunami, March 2011
This role of Japanese organized crime also pertains to the removal of the fuel rods from Reactor no. 4. As documented in several GR articles, this undertaking –if mishandled– by careless workers under the lax supervision of corrupt subcontractors (linked to the Yakusa) creates an environment which could potentially lead to a massive radioactive fallout:
An operation with potentially “apocalyptic” consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now – “as early as November 8″ – at Fukushima’s damaged and sinking
Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300
spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima
bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor’s upper
floor.
While
the Reactor 4 building itself did not suffer a meltdown, it did suffer a
hydrogen explosion, is now tipping and sinking and has zero ability to withstand another seismic event.
To remove the rods, TEPCO has erected a
273-ton mobile crane above the building that will be operated remotely
from a separate room….
A recent Reuters report documents in detail the role of Japan’s
Yakuza and its insidious relationship to both TEPCO as well as agencies
of the Japanese government including the Ministry of Health, Labor and
Welfare:
Nearly 50 gangs with 1,050
members operate in Fukushima prefecture dominated by three major
syndicates – Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai, police say.
Ministries, the companies involved in the
decontamination and decommissioning work, and police have set up a task
force to eradicate organized crime from the nuclear clean-up project.
Police investigators say they cannot crack down on the gang members they
track without receiving a complaint. They also rely on major
contractors for information.
In a rare prosecution involving a yakuza
executive, Yoshinori Arai, a boss in a gang affiliated with the
Sumiyoshi-kai, was convicted of labor law violations. Arai admitted
pocketing around $60,000 over two years by skimming a third of wages
paid to workers in the disaster zone. In March a judge gave him an
eight-month suspended sentence because Arai said he had resigned from
the gang and regretted his actions.
Arai was convicted of supplying workers to a site managed by Obayashi, one of Japan’s leading contractors,
in Date, a town northwest of the Fukushima plant. Date was in the path
of the most concentrated plume of radiation after the disaster.
A police official with knowledge of the investigation said Arai’s case was just “the tip of the iceberg” in terms of organized crime involvement in the clean-up.
A spokesman for Obayashi said the company “did not notice” that one of its subcontractors was getting workers from a gangster.
“In contracts with our subcontractors we
have clauses on not cooperating with organized crime,” the spokesman
said, adding the company was working with the police and its
subcontractors to ensure this sort of violation does not happen again.
In April, the Ministry of Health, Labor
and Welfare sanctioned three companies for illegally dispatching workers
to Fukushima. One of those, a Nagasaki-based company called Yamato
Engineering, sent 510 workers to lay pipe at the nuclear plant in
violation of labor laws banning brokers. All three companies were
ordered by labor regulators to improve business practices, records show.
In 2009, Yamato Engineering was banned
from public works projects because of a police determination that it was
“effectively under the control of organized crime,” according to a
public notice by the Nagasaki-branch of the land and transport ministry.
Yamato Engineering had no immediate comment.
…
In towns and villages around the plant in
Fukushima, thousands of workers wielding industrial hoses, operating
mechanical diggers and wearing dosimeters to measure radiation have been
deployed to scrub houses and roads, dig up topsoil and strip trees of
leaves in an effort to reduce background radiation so that refugees can
return home.
Hundreds of small companies have
been given contracts for this decontamination work. Nearly 70 percent of
those surveyed in the first half of 2013 had broken labor regulations,
according to a labor ministry report in July. The ministry’s
Fukushima office had received 567 complaints related to working
conditions in the decontamination effort in the year to March. It issued
10 warnings. No firm was penalized.
One of the firms that has faced
complaints is Denko Keibi, which before the disaster used to supply
security guards for construction sites. (Special Report: Help wanted in Fukushima: Low pay, high risks and gangsters, by Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito, Reuters, October 25, 2013)
(To Read Reuters article click:
In the face of ceaseless media disinformation pertaining to the
dangers of global nuclear radiation, our objective at GR has been to
break the media vacuum and raise public awareness, while also pointing
to the complicity of the governments, the media and the nuclear
industry.We call upon our readers to spread the word.
About the author:
Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and Editor of the globalresearch.ca website. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America’s “War on Terrorism”(2005). His most recent book is entitled Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. He can be reached at crgeditor@yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Michel Chossudovsky est directeur du Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation et professeur émérite de sciences économiques à l’Université d’Ottawa. Il est l’auteur de "Guerre et mondialisation, La vérité derrière le 11 septembre", "La Mondialisation de la pauvreté et nouvel ordre mondial" (best-seller international publié en plus de 10 langues). Contact : crgeditor@yahoo.comRelated content:
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