How the Yakuza went nuclear

February 21st, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

As the scale of the catastrophe at Fukushima became apparent, many workers
fled the scene. To contain the nuclear meltdown, a handful of workers stayed
behind, being exposed to large amounts of radiation: the so-called
“Fukushima Fifty”. Among this heroic group, according to Suzuki, were
several members of the yakuza.

The yakuza are not a secret society in Japan. The government tacitly
recognises their existence, and they are classified, designated and
regulated. Yakuza make their money from extortion, blackmail,
construction, real estate, collection services, financial market
manipulation, protection rackets, fraud and a labyrinth of front companies
including labour dispatch services and private detective agencies. They do
the work that no one else will do or find the workers for jobs no one wants.

“Almost all nuclear power plants that are built in Japan are built taking the
risk that the workers may well be exposed to large amounts of radiation,”
says Suzuki. “That they will get sick, they will die early, or they will die
on the job. And the people bringing the workers to the plants and also doing
the construction are often yakuza.” Suzuki says he’s met over 1,000 yakuza
in his career as an investigative journalist and former editor of yakuza
fanzines. For his book, The Yakuza and the Nuclear Industry, Suzuki
went undercover at Fukushima to find first-hand evidence of the
long-rumoured ties between the nuclear industry and the yakuza. First
he documents how remarkably easy it was to become a nuclear worker at
Fukushima after the meltdown. After signing up with a legitimate company
providing labour, he entered the plant armed only with a wristwatch with a
hidden camera. Working there over several months, he quickly found yakuza-supplied
labour, and many former yakuza working on site themselves.

Suzuki discovered evidence of Tepco subcontractors paying yakuza front
companies to obtain lucrative construction contracts; of money destined for
construction work flying into yakuza accounts; and of politicians and
media being paid to look the other way. More shocking, perhaps, were the
conditions he says he found inside the plant.

His fellow workers, found Suzuki, were a motley crew of homeless, chronically
unemployed Japanese men, former yakuza, debtors who owed money to the yakuza,
and the mentally handicapped. Suzuki claims the regular employees at the
plant were often given better radiation suits than the yakuza
recruits. (Tepco has admitted that there was a shortage of equipment in the
disaster’s early days.) The regular employees were allowed to pass through
sophisticated radiation monitors while the temporary labourers were simply
given hand rods to monitor their radiation exposure.

When Suzuki was working in the plant in August, he had to wear a full-body
radiation protective suit and a gas mask that covered his entire face. The
hot summer temperatures and the lack of breathability in the suits ensured
that almost every day a worker would keel over with heat exhaustion and be
carried out; they would invariably return to work the next day. Going to the
bathroom was virtually impossible, so workers were simply told to “hold it”.
According to Suzuki, the temperature monitors in the plant weren’t even
working, and were ignored. Removing the mask during work was against the
rules; no matter how thirsty workers became, they could not drink water.
After an hour fixing pipes and doing other work, Suzuki says his body felt
like it was enveloped in flames. Workers were not checked to see if they
were coping, they were expected to report it to their supervisors. However,
while Tepco officials on the ground told the workers not to risk injury, it
seemed that anyone complaining of the working conditions or fatigue would be
fired. Few took their allotted rest breaks.

Those who reported feeling unwell were treated by Tepco doctors, nearly always
with what Suzuki says was essentially cold medicine.The risk of radiation
exposure was 100 per cent. The masks, if their filters were cleaned
regularly, which they were not, could only remove 60 per cent of the
radioactive particles in the air. Anonymous workers claimed that the filters
themselves were ill-fitting; if they accidentally bumped their masks,
radiation could easily get in. The workers’ dosimeter badges, meanwhile,
used to measure an individual’s exposure to radiation, could be easily
manipulated to give false readings. According to Suzuki, tricks like pinning
a badge on backwards, or putting it in your sock, were commonplace. Regular
workers were given dosimeters which would sound an alarm when radiation
exceeded safe levels, but it made such a racket that, says Suzuki, “people
just turned them off or over and kept working.”

The initial work, directly after a series of hydrogen explosions in March, was
extremely dangerous. Radiation was reaching levels so high that the Japanese
government raised the safety exposure levels and even ordered scientists to
stop monitoring radiation levels in some areas of the plants. Tepco sent out
word to their contractors to gather as many people as possible and to offer
substantial wages. Yakuza recruited from all over Japan; the initial
workers were paid 50,000 yen (£407) per day, but one dispatch company
offered 200,000 yen (£1,627) per day.

Even then, recruits were hard to find. Officials in Fukushima reportedly told
local businesses, “Bring us the living dead. People no one will miss.”
The labour crunch was eased somewhat when the Japanese government and Tepco
raised the “safe” radiation exposure levels at the plant from pre-earthquake
levels of 130-180cpm (radiation exposure per minute) to 100,000cpm.

The work would be further subcontracted to the point where labourers were
being sent from sixth-tier firms. A representative from one company told
Suzuki of an agreement made with a Tepco subcontractor right after the
accident: “Normally, to even enter the grounds of a nuclear power plant a
nuclear radiation personal data management pocketbook is required. We were
told that wasn’t necessary. We didn’t even have time to give the workers
physical examinations before they were sent to the plant.”

A former yakuza boss tells me that his group has “always” been involved
in recruiting labourers for the nuclear industry. “It’s dirty, dangerous
work,” he says, “and the only people who will do it are homeless, yakuza,
or people so badly in debt that they see no other way to pay it off.” Suzuki
found people who’d been threatened into working at Fukushima, but others
who’d volunteered. Why? “Of course, if it was a matter of dying today or
tomorrow they wouldn’t work there,” he explains. “It’s because it could take
10 years or more for someone to possibly die of radiation excess. It’s like
Russian roulette. If you owe enough money to the yakuza, working at a
nuclear plant is a safer bet. Wouldn’t you rather take a chance at dying 10
years later than being stabbed to death now?” (Suzuki’s own feeling was that
the effects of low-level radiation are still unknown and that, as a drinker
and smoker, he’s probably no more likely to get cancer than he was before.)

A recent report in Japan’s Mainichi newspaper alleged that
workers from southern Japan were brought to the plant in July on false
pretences and told to get to work. Many had to enter dangerous radioactive
buildings. One man was reportedly tasked with carrying 20kg kilogram sheets
of lead from the bottom floor of a damaged reactor up to the sixth floor,
where his Geiger counters went into the danger zone. One worker said, “When
I tried to quit, the people employing me mentioned the name of a local yakuza
group. I got the hint. If Tepco didn’t know what was going on, I believe
they should have.” Former Tepco executives, workers, police officials, as
well as investigative journalist, Katsunobu Onda, author of TEPCO: The
Dark Empire, all agree: Tepco have always known they were working with
the yakuza; they just didn’t care. However, the articles Suzuki wrote
before his book was published, and my own work, helped create enough public
outcry to force Tepco into action. On July 19, four months after the
meltdowns, they announced that they would be cutting ties with organised
crime.

“They asked the companies that have been working with them for years to send
them papers showing they’d cut organised crime ties,” Suzuki says. “They
followed up by taking a survey.” Tepco has not answered my own questions on
their anti-organised crime initiative as of this date; they’ve previously
called Suzuki’s claims “groundless”.

The situation at Fukushima is still dire. Number-two reactor continues to heat
up, and appears to be out of control. Rolling blackouts are a regular
occurrence. Nuclear reactors are being shut down, one by one, all over
Japan. Meanwhile, there is talk that Tepco will be nationalised and its top
executives are under investigation for criminal negligence, in relation to
the 3/11 disaster. As for the yakuza, the police are beginning to
investigate their front companies more closely. “Yakuza may be
a plague on society,” says Suzuki, “but they don’t ruin the lives of
hundreds of thousands of people and irradiate the planet out of sheer greed
and incompetence.” Suzuki says he’s had little trouble from the yakuza
about his book’s allegations. He suspects this is because he showed they
were prepared to risk their lives at Fukushima – he almost made them look
good.