Yakuza sign up vagrants to work on radiation clean-up in Fukushima
Gangs send out recruiters to prey on homeless in murky labour market that has been created in the fallout from nuclear disaster at Fukushima
Seiji Sasa arrives at the train station in Sendai, northern Japan, before dawn most mornings to prowl for homeless men.
He isn't a social worker. He's a recruiter. The men in Sendai Station are potential labourers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan's nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of US$100 a head.
"This is how labour recruiters like me come in every day," Sasa said, as he walked past men sleeping on cardboard.
I don’t ask any questions … I just find people and send them to work … That’s it
It's also how Japan finds people willing to accept minimum wage for one of the least desirable jobs in the industrialised world - working on the US$35 billion, taxpayer-funded effort to clean up radioactive fallout across an area of northern Japan larger than Hong Kong.
Almost three years ago, the massive earthquake and tsunami levelled villages across Japan's northeast coast and set off multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Today, the most ambitious radiation clean-up ever attempted is being dogged by both a lack of oversight and a shortage of workers. In January, October and November last year, Japanese gangsters were arrested on charges of infiltrating construction giant Obayashi Corp's network of decontamination subcontractors and illegally sending workers to the government-funded project.
In the October case, homeless men were rounded up at Sendai's train station by Sasa, then put to work clearing radioactive soil and debris in Fukushima for less than the minimum wage.
The men reported up through a chain of three other companies to Obayashi, Japan's second-largest construction company.