Down and out in Fukushima

FUKUSHIMA

NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE: A 9.0 earthquake and 15-meter high tsunami waves on March 11, 2011 triggered multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. REUTERS/ISSEI KATO

Jobs at Japan’s crippled nuclear plant offer low pay, high risks of radiation. And your boss could be a member of the yakuza. Down and out in Fukushima

BY ANTONI SLODKOWSKI AND MARI SAITO IWAKI, JAPAN, OCTOBER 25, 2013

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etsuya Hayashi went to Fukushima to take a job at ground zero of Tthe worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He lasted less than two weeks. Hayashi, 41, says he was recruited for a job monitoring the radiation exposure of workers leaving the plant in the summer of 2012. Instead, when he turned up for work, he was handed off through a web of contractors and assigned, to his surprise, to one of Fukushima’s hottest radiation zones. He was told he would have to wear an oxygen tank and a double-layer protective suit. Even then, his handlers told him, the radiation would be so high it could burn through his annual exposure limit in just under an hour. “I felt cheated and entrapped,” Hayashi said. “I had not agreed to any of this.” UNHAPPY SURPRISE: Tetsuya Hayashi didn’t realize he’d be assigned to one of Fukushima’s highest When Hayashi took his grievances radiation zones. His Tepco ID card (below) is pictured atop a copy of his resume, which he says his to a firm on the next rung up the ladder employer forged. REUTERS/TORU HANAI of Fukushima contractors, he says he was fired. He filed a complaint but has not received any response from labour regulators I felt cheated and for more than a year. All the eight compa- entrapped. I had not agreed to nies involved, including embattled plant any of this. operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, declined to comment or could not be reached Tetsuya Hayashi for comment on his case. Out of work, Hayashi found a second job at Fukushima, this time building a con- crete base for tanks to hold spent fuel rods. His new employer skimmed almost a third of his wages – about $1,500 a month – and dependence on a sprawling and little scru- Obayashi, Shimizu Corp and Taisei Corp paid him the rest in cash in brown paper tinised network of subcontractors – many – oversee hundreds of small firms work- envelopes, he says. Reuters reviewed docu- of them inexperienced with nuclear work ing on government-funded contracts to ments related to Hayashi’s complaint, in- and some of them, police say, have ties to remove radioactive dirt and debris from cluding pay envelopes and bank statements. organised crime. nearby villages and farms so evacuees can Hayashi’s hard times are not unusual in Tepco sits atop a pyramid of subcontrac- return home. the estimated $150-billion effort to dis- tors that can run to seven or more layers and Tokyo Electric, widely known as Tepco, mantle the Fukushima reactors and clean includes construction giants such as Kajima says it has been unable to monitor subcon- up the neighbouring areas, a Reuters ex- Corp and Obayashi Corp in the first tier. tractors fully but has taken steps to limit amination found. The embattled utility remains in charge worker abuses and curb the involvement of In reviewing Fukushima working con- of the work to dismantle the damaged organised crime. ditions, Reuters interviewed more than Fukushima reactors, a government-subsi- “We sign contracts with companies 80 workers, employers and officials in- dized job expected to take 30 years or more. based on the cost needed to carry out a volved in the unprecedented nuclear clean- Outside the plant, Japan’s “Big Four” task,” Masayuki Ono, a general manager up. A common complaint: the project’s construction companies – Kajima, for nuclear power at Tepco, told Reuters.

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DECONTAMINATION: Thousands of workers are picking up radioactive debris in towns and villages around Fukushima prefecture and storing them in huge blue bags, which for now are piling up along roadsides. REUTERS/SOPHIE KNIGHT

“The companies then hire their own em- It’s very difficult for us to go then transferred to more than 1,000 tanks, ployees taking into account our contract. enough to fill more than 130 Olympic- It’s very difficult for us to go in and check in and check their contracts. sized swimming pools. their contracts.” Masayuki Ono Dismantling the Fukushima Daiichi The unprecedented Fukushima nuclear general manager for nuclear power, Tepco plant will require maintaining a job pool of clean-up both inside and outside the plant at least 12,000 workers just through 2015, faces a deepening shortage of workers. Tepco, Asia’s largest listed power utility, according to Tepco’s blueprint. That com- There are about 25 percent more openings had long enjoyed close ties to regulators pares to just over 8,000 registered workers than applicants for jobs in Fukushima pre- and lax government oversight. That came now. In recent months, some 6,000 have fecture, according to government data. under harsh scrutiny after a 9.0 magnitude been working inside the plant. Raising wages could draw more work- earthquake and a massive tsunami hit the The Tepco hiring estimate does not in- ers but that has not happened, the data plant on March 11, 2011. The disaster trig- clude the manpower required for the gov- shows. Tepco is under pressure to post a gered three reactor meltdowns, a series of ernment’s new $330 million plan to build profit in the year to March 2014 under a explosions and a radiation leak that forced a massive ice wall around the plant to keep turnaround plan Japan’s top banks recently 150,000 people to flee nearby villages. radiated water from leaking into the sea. financed with $5.9 billion in new loans and Tepco’s hapless efforts since to stabi- “I think we should really ask whether refinancing. In 2011, in the wake of the di- lise the situation have been like some- they are able to do this while ensuring saster, Tepco cut pay for its own workers by one playing “whack-a-mole”, Minister of the safety of the workers,” said Shinichi 20 percent. Economy, Trade and Industry Toshimitsu Nakayama, deputy director of safety re- With wages flat and workers scarce, la- Motegi has said. search at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. bour brokers have stepped into the gap, re- Japan’s nuclear industry has relied on ‘NUCLEAR GYPSIES’ cruiting people whose lives have reached a cheap labour since the first plants, includ- dead end or who have trouble finding a job Hayashi is one of an estimated 50,000 ing Fukushima, opened in the 1970s. For outside the disaster zone. workers who have been hired so far to years, the industry has rounded up itiner- The result has been a proliferation of shut down the nuclear plant and decon- ant workers known as “nuclear gypsies” small firms – many unregistered. Some 800 taminate the towns and villages nearby. from the Sanya neighbourhood of Tokyo companies are active inside the Fukushima Thousands more will have to follow. Some and Kamagasaki in Osaka, areas known for plant and hundreds more are working in of the workers will be needed to maintain large numbers of homeless men. the decontamination effort outside its the system that cools damaged fuel rods in “Working conditions in the nuclear in- gates, according to Tepco and documents the reactors with thousands of tonnes of dustry have always been bad,” said Saburo reviewed by Reuters. water every day. The contaminated runoff is Murata, deputy director of Osaka’s Hannan

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Chuo Hospital. “Problems with money, outsourced recruitment, lack of proper TETSUYA HAYASHI health insurance – these have existed for decades.” The Fukushima project has magnified I felt cheated and entrapped those problems. When Japan’s parliament approved a bill to fund decontamination I went to work in the Fukushima Daiichi When I received my nuclear worker’s work in August 2011, the law did not apply nuclear power plant in June last year. passbook after my stint, it said that I existing rules regulating the construction I was recruited to work as a surveyor used to be an employee of Suzushi and industry. As a result, contractors working checking radiation exposure of workers ABL Co. Ltd. But I had never signed on decontamination have not been required leaving the plant. When I arrived in Iwaki, any contract with either of the two to disclose information on management or a town close to the crippled nuclear companies. I suspect they forged my undergo any screening. plant, I was picked up by RH Kogyo, a handbook to hide the fact that they That meant anyone could become a contractor I had never heard of before. outsourced my employment to smaller nuclear contractor overnight. Many small It was one of the many firms firms. companies without experience rushed to that handled me inside the plant. In I went back and confronted my bid for contracts and then often turned to one of the first meetings, a mid-tier former employers about everything. They brokers to round up the manpower, accord- subcontractor, Suzushi Kogyo, asked took me to Suzushi’s office and yelled me to write on my application that I had at me. They also called my mother to three years of experience working for a tell her that I was in trouble. I refused to construction company in Fukushima. They somehow obtained my resume and added that information to it. They also I got fired for asking 12,000 asked me to sign the form with a falsified The number of workers that questions about their “hanko” - stamp used in Japan to sign will be needed until 2015 to documents. responsibility. decommission the Fukushima Only after I had signed the papers I Daiichi nuclear power plant. was told by ABL - a subcontractor higher up the chain - that we would be working sign a pledge that I wouldn’t cause them Source: Tepco in a highly radioactive environment. I any more problems, so they asked her would have to wear a full face mask, to come to Fukushima and do it on my ing to employers and workers. double-layered protective suit and an behalf. The resulting influx of workers has oxygen tank. I told my mother not to worry and turned the town of Iwaki, some 50 kilo- I felt cheated and entrapped. I did that I was fine. I wanted them to explain metres (30 miles) from the plant, into a not agree to any of this and I was worried why they weren’t telling the truth about bustling labour hub at the front line of the about radioactive exposure that will my pay, about the kind of job I was massive public works project. not allow me to work as long as I had supposed to be doing, about radiation at In extreme cases, brokers have been planned. One of the bosses handling us the work site and why they falsified my known to “buy” workers by paying off said: “It doesn’t build up in you. Once documents, including my own resume. their debts. The workers are then forced to you wait a week, the amount of radiation I didn’t get a satisfactory answer, work until they pay off their new bosses for goes down by half.” so I filed a complaint to Tepco and with sharply reduced wages and under condi- Soon after that, I got fired for asking the Fukushima labour standards office. I tions that make it hard for them to speak questions about their responsibility gave the regulators evidence to support out against abuses, labour activists and and for taking my grievances to my claims, but they have not decided on workers in Fukushima said. subcontractors closer to Tepco in the anything for over a year. Lake Barrett, a former U.S. nuclear hierarchy. regulator and an advisor to Tepco, says Text continues on page 6

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Hiring Hayashi Seven subcontractors were involved in hiring and assigning work for Tetsuya Hayashi at Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The main five firms include:

Tepco Operator of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant Tokyo Energy and Systems Major subcontractor Specializes in planning, design and construction of plants. Briefs workers on their assignments.

ABL Nuclear contractor Specializes in plant construction and maintenance. Briefs workers on their assignments.

Suzushi Kogyo Subcontractor Specializes in construction and engineering work. Organizes workers’ paperwork and supplies them to larger contractors.

RH Kogyo Broker Collects and houses workers near the plant. Instructs them before meeting contractors higher up the chain.

Full Mark Broker Recruites workers to nuclear power plant via online advertisements.

Hayashi’s story

Full Mark oﬀers RH Kogyo signs one Suzushi Kogyo and ABL tells him Tokyo Energy & Hayashi job as year contract with another handling he will work Systems tells him surveyor at the Hayashi. company tell him in highly he will only be plant. to sign resume with radioactive area. able to work 5 to false information. 10 minutes at a time due to radioactivity.

President of Suzushi Hayashi complains to ABL he Kogyo yells at him was pushed into something and fires him. he did not agree to.

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the system is so ingrained it will take time to change. “There’s been a century of tradition of big Japanese companies using contractors, and that’s just the way it is in Japan,” he told Reuters. “You’re not going to change that overnight just because you have a new job here, so I think you have to adapt.” A Tepco survey from 2012 showed nearly half of the workers at Fukushima were employed by one contractor but managed by another. Japanese law prohibits such arrangements, in order to prevent brokers from skimming workers’ wages. Tepco said the survey represents one of the steps it has taken to crack down on abuses. “We take issues related to inappro- priate subcontractors very seriously,” the utility said in a statement to Reuters. RADIATION RISKS: Workers are constantly screened for radiation as they work to permanently shut Tepco said it warns its contractors to re- down the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. REUTERS/ISSEI KATO spect labour regulations. The company said it has established a hotline for workers, and has organised lectures for subcontractors In contracts with our regulations, along with local authorities to raise awareness on labour regulations. subcontractors, we have and police. In June, it introduced compulsory training Yousuke Minaguchi, a lawyer who for new workers on what constitutes illegal clauses on not cooperating with has represented Fukushima workers, says employment practices. organized crime.. Japan’s government has turned a blind eye Tepco does not publish average hourly to the problem of worker exploitation. “On wages in the plant. Workers interviewed by Obayashi Corp spokesman the surface, they say it is illegal. But in real- Reuters said wages could be as low as around ity they don’t want to do anything. By not $6 an hour, but usually average around $12 “Proper oversight is important in pre- punishing anyone, they can keep using a lot an hour – about a third lower than the aver- venting careless mistakes. Right now Tepco of workers cheaply.” age in Japan’s construction industry. may be leaving it all up to the subcon- Economy Minister Motegi, who is re- Workers for subcontractors in the most- tractors,” said the head of Japan’s Nuclear sponsible for Japan’s energy policy and contaminated area outside the plant are Regulation Authority, Shunichi Tanaka in decommissioning of the plant, instructed supposed to be paid an additional govern- response to the recent accidents. Tepco to improve housing for workers. He ment-funded hazard allowance of about Tepco said it will take measures to en- has said more needs to be done to ensure $100 per day, although many report it has sure that such accidents are not repeated. workers are being treated well. not been paid. The utility said it monitors safety with spot “To get work done, it’s necessary to co- The work in the plant can also be danger- inspections and checks on safeguards for operate with a large number of companies,” ous. Six workers in October were exposed workers when projects are divided between he told Reuters. “Making sure that those to radioactive water when one of them de- subcontractors. relations are proper, and that work is mov- tached a pipe connected to a treatment sys- The NRA, which is primarily charged ing forward is something we need to keep tem. In August, 12 workers were irradiated with reactor safety, is only one of several working on daily.” when removing rubble from around one of agencies dealing with the Fukushima proj- FALSIFIED PASSBOOK the reactors. The accidents prompted Japan’s ect: the ministries of labour, environment, nuclear regulator to question whether Tepco trade and economy are also responsible Hayashi offers a number of reasons for his has been delegating too much. for managing the clean-up and enforcing decision to head to Fukushima from his

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home in Nagano, an area in central Japan famous for its ski slopes, where in his youth RYO GOSHIMA Hayashi honed his snowboarding skills. He says he was sceptical of the government’s early claim that the Fukushima They told me never to plant was under control and wanted to see it for himself. He had worked in construc- return home tion, knew how to weld and felt he could contribute. I was an affiliate of a gang tied to Like many other workers, Hayashi Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s most powerful was initially recruited by a broker. He was yakuza syndicate, from the age of 14 placed with RH Kogyo, a subcontractor six until I quit at age 20. My main duties levels removed from Tepco. were collecting debts and staying at the When he arrived in Fukushima, Hayashi yakuza office overnight as a guard. When received instructions from five other firms you’re with them, you have no freedom. in addition to the labour broker and RH I wanted to stay with my girlfriend and Kogyo. It was the sixth contractor up the be free to do whatever I wanted to do. CONTAMINATED?: Goshima said he was ladder, ABL Co. Ltd that told him he So I quit. forced to eat mushrooms and bee larvae would be working in a highly radioactive After that, I was beaten up and was gathered from the highly radioactive area. ABL Co reported to Tokyo Energy & forced to pay about $2,000 a month for evacuation zone around Fukushima. Systems Inc, which in Fukushima manages several months. I borrowed cash from REUTERS/ISSEI KATO some 200 workers as a first-tier contractor loan sharks and paid them over $13,000. under Tepco. I had to leave the city, because they Hayashi says he kept copies of his work wouldn’t leave me alone. My parents weeds from rice paddies. Some people records and took pictures and videos inside didn’t want any problems with the gang, didn’t bother and just threw the leaves the plant, encouraged by a TV journalist he so they told me never to return home. in the river. After hours, my team leader had met before beginning his assignment. I started looking for a well-paid job as used to invite us to “parties” in his room. At one point, his boss from RH Kogyo told far away from home as possible. That’s We were forced to eat fish, mushrooms him not to worry because any radiation he how I found my way to Fukushima. In and fried bee larvae that he picked next was exposed to would not “build up”. the summer of last year, a labour broker to our work site. I was worried because “Once you wait a week, the amount offered me a job. His pinky finger was mushrooms are known to suck up of radiation goes down by half,” the man missing and he was covered in tattoos. radioactive cesium. is seen telling him in one of the record- He did not hide the fact he was a former He and other workers would poke ings. The former supervisor declined to yakuza member. fun at me for being scared to eat these comment. He said he would pay me about $160 things. He also started charging us The statement represents a mistaken ac- a day, and in September 2012 I started about $20-30 per meal. The parties took count of radiation safety standards applied work in the decontamination of Tamura, place two-three times a week. That was in Fukushima, which are based on the view a township close to the Fukushima a lot of money for radioactive food. that there is no such thing as a safe dose. plant. Each month, the broker would When I was asked to leave, they paid Workers are limited to 100 millisieverts hand over pay in a brown envelope, but me $3,000 in unpaid wages and I also of radiation exposure over five years. The I ended up getting paid $90 a day. I also received a payout of around $6,000 as didn’t receive the government-funded my final salary. After I quit, I moved to dangerous work allowance of $100 a Tokyo to start a full-time job. day. My dream is that one day I will have The work was quite mundane. I had enough money to bring my girlfriend to collect fallen leaves and cut grass and from Nagano over here.

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International Atomic Energy Agency says In September 2012, Hayashi found an- employed him, said it had fired another exposure over that threshold measurably other job with a subcontractor for Kajima, employee who was found to have skimmed raises the risk of later cancers. one of Japan’s largest construction compa- Goshima’s wages. Tech said Goshima After Hayashi’s first two-week stint at nies. He didn’t want to go back home emp- left for personal reasons. The firm paid the plant ended, he discovered his nuclear ty-handed and says he thought he might Goshima back wages, both sides say. The passbook – a record of radiation exposure have been just unlucky with his first bad total payment was $9,000, according to – had been falsified to show he had been experience at the plant. Goshima. an employee of larger firms higher up the Instead, his problems continued. This Kajima spokesman Atsushi Fujino said ladder of contractors, not RH Kogyo. time a broker who recruited several work- the company was not in a position to com- Reuters reviewed the passbook and doc- ers for the subcontractor insisted on access ment on either of the cases since it did not uments related to Hayashi’s employment. to his bank account and then took almost a have a contract with Hayashi or Goshima. The nuclear passbook shows that Hayashi third of the roughly $160 Hayashi was sup- “We pay the companies who work for was employed by Suzushi Kogyo from May posed to be earning each day, Hayashi says. us and instruct those companies to pay the to June 2012. It says Take One employed The broker, according to Hayashi, iden- hazard allowance,” the Kajima spokesman Hayashi for ten days in June 2012. Hayashi tified himself as a former member of a local said in a statement. says that is false because he had a one-year gang from Hayashi’s native Nagano. THE YAKUZA CONNECTION contract with RH Kogyo. Ryo Goshima, 23, said the same broker “My suspicion is that they falsified the from Nagano placed him in a crew doing The complexity of Fukushima contracts records to hide the fact that they had out- decontamination work and then skimmed and the shortage of workers have played sourced my employment,” Hayashi said. almost half of what he had been promised. into the hands of the yakuza, Japan’s or- ABL Co. said Hayashi had worked with Goshima and Hayashi became friends in ganised crime syndicates, which have run the firm but declined to comment on his Fukushima when they wound up working labour rackets for generations. claims. Tepco, Tokyo Energy & Systems, for the same firm. Nearly 50 gangs with 1,050 members op- Suzushi Kogyo and RH Kogyo also de- Goshima said he was fired in December erate in Fukushima prefecture dominated by clined to comment. Take One could not be after complaining about the skimming three major syndicates – Yamaguchi-gumi, reached for comment. practice. Tech, the contractor that had Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai, police say.

A $183 billion clean-up Costs associated with the clean-up at and around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

DECONTAMINATION Japan’s National Institute of COMPENSATION DECOMMISSIONING REACTORS 1 TO 4* Advanced Industrial Science and Tepco says it has Predicting the costs of decommissioning of the four damaged Technology estimates that the paid out $30 billion reactors — an extremely complex process expected to take at overall cost of decontamination (2.93 trillion yen) in least thirty years — is very di icult, scientists say. Several nuclear would be as much as $52.6 billion compensation as of experts interviewed by Reuters estimated that the operation (5.1 trillion yen). October 4. would cost at least $100 billion.

$52.6 $30 $100

TOTAL = $182.6 billion

*Tepco has so far set aside $9.9 billion (960 billion yen) to decommission the four reactors. The Japanese government has ordered the utility to allocate an additional $10.3 billion (1 trillion yen) to the task. Sources: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology; Tokyo Electric Power Corp.; Reuters.

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GHOST TOWNS: More than 150,000 people fled Fukushima prefecture after the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster. Many refugees have not been allowed back due to radioactive contamination from the devastated nuclear power plant, creating empty towns such as Tomioka. REUTERS/STRINGER

Ministries, the companies involved in from the gang and regretted his actions. and its subcontractors to ensure this sort of the decontamination and decommissioning Arai was convicted of supplying work- violation does not happen again. work, and police have set up a task force to ers to a site managed by Obayashi, one of In April, the Ministry of Health, Labour eradicate organised crime from the nuclear Japan’s leading contractors, in Date, a town and Welfare sanctioned three companies for clean-up project. Police investigators say northwest of the Fukushima plant. Date illegally dispatching workers to Fukushima. they cannot crack down on the gang mem- was in the path of the most concentrated One of those, a Nagasaki-based company bers they track without receiving a com- plume of radiation after the disaster. called Yamato Engineering, sent 510 work- plaint. They also rely on major contractors A police official with knowledge of the ers to lay pipe at the nuclear plant in vio- for information. investigation said Arai’s case was just “the lation of labour laws banning brokers. All In a rare prosecution involving a yakuza tip of the iceberg” in terms of organised three companies were ordered by labour executive, Yoshinori Arai, a boss in a gang crime involvement in the clean-up. regulators to improve business practices, affiliated with the Sumiyoshi-kai, was con- A spokesman for Obayashi said the com- records show. victed of labour law violations. Arai admit- pany “did not notice” that one of its subcon- In 2009, Yamato Engineering was ted pocketing around $60,000 over two tractors was getting workers from a gangster. banned from public works projects because years by skimming a third of wages paid “In contracts with our subcontractors we of a police determination that it was “ef- to workers in the disaster zone. In March a have clauses on not cooperating with or- fectively under the control of organised judge gave him an eight-month suspended ganised crime,” the spokesman said, adding crime,” according to a public notice by the sentence because Arai said he had resigned the company was working with the police Nagasaki-branch of the land and transport

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ministry. Yamato Engineering had no im- mediate comment. ANONYMOUS WORKER, 55 Goshima said he himself had been working for the local chapter of Yamaguchi- gumi since the age of 14, extorting money You can’t see radiation and collecting debts. He quit at age 20 after spending some time in jail. He had to It was almost midnight by the time I what that was until I later realized they borrow money from a loan shark to pay off arrived. The room smelled of auto grease meant the devastated Fukushima No. 1 his gang, which demanded about $2,000 a and was littered with tools and dirty rags. nuclear plant. month for several months to let him go. I could barely see the single mattress No one had told me I would be doing “My parents didn’t want any problems squeezed into the corner of the storage dangerous work in a contaminated from the gang, so they told me to leave and container. My new employer handed me plant. It’s not like there’s any colour or never return,” Goshima said. He went to a sleeping bag and said: “You can stay smell to radiation. You can’t see it, so you Fukushima looking for a well-paying job to here until we find a more permanent are not afraid of it. pay down the debt – and ended up workplace for you.” They say you might die from it in 30 ing for a yakuza member from his home I left home, got in the car and years but I know I’m not going to live district. drove from Kyushu in southern Japan that long. I was first assigned to check to Fukushima for several days. It was damage inside one of the crippled November and below freezing in reactor buildings – I had to wear In hindsight, this is not Fukushima. I had less than 50 cents left several protective layers. Sometimes in my bank account. my dosimeter would go off only after something an amateur should My life had unravelled one loan at a several minutes because the radiation have gotten involved in. time. My teenage sons borrowed from was high. At the end of January I was Denko Keibi executive a black market lender who called with told my contract had expired. I wanted to daily death threats until I paid up. escape but I thought they might hurt me As a result I lost my salaried job. I also if I tried. I only had 30,000 yen and a car got divorced spending the next seven years with an out-of-town number plate. It’d DECONTAMINATION COMPLAINTS working at a bread factory in southern be easy for them to find me. In towns and villages around the plant in Japan. Last autumn after a breakdown in So I stayed for a few more months Fukushima, thousands of workers wielding a relationship with my girlfriend I decided before running away to work for a guy industrial hoses, operating mechanical dig- I had to do something to start afresh. The who treated me really well. I had my own gers and wearing dosimeters to measure ra- online ad I answered said I would clear room and he gave me food even on days diation have been deployed to scrub houses rubble in the area around the plant. It I didn’t work. and roads, dig up topsoil and strip trees of promised up to $300 a day. I felt bad at first eating at the table leaves in an effort to reduce background ra- But after I arrived in Fukushima I had with everyone else, but he said, “Don’t diation so that refugees can return home. no job, no money and nowhere else to feel bad, you’ve been through a lot. You Hundreds of small companies have been go. After weeks of waiting, I was told I can eat with the others.” I feel like a given contracts for this decontamination was going to work in “1F”. I didn’t know human being again. work. Nearly 70 percent of those surveyed in the first half of 2013 had broken labour regulations, according to a labour ministry report in July. The ministry’s Fukushima office had received 567 complaints related disaster used to supply security guards for been packed five to a room in small cab- to working conditions in the decontamina- construction sites. ins. Dinner was typically a bowl of rice and tion effort in the year to March. It issued 10 Denko Keibi managed 35 workers in half a pepper or a sardine, they said. When warnings. No firm was penalized. Tamura, a village near the plant. At an ar- a driver transporting workers flipped their One of the firms that has faced com- bitration session in May that Reuters at- van on an icy road in December, supervisors plaints is Denko Keibi, which before the tended, the workers complained they had ordered workers to take off their uniforms

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EXPLOITED: Nearly half the workers at Fukushima are hired by one firm but work for another in violation of Japanese law. REUTERS/ ISSEI KATO

and scatter to distant hospitals, the work- often because they have to keep paying anti-nuclear activist, Taro Yamamoto. ers said. Denko Keibi had no insurance for back loans to their employers. “Major contractors that run this system workplace accidents and wanted to avoid “The workers are scared to sue because think that workers will always be afraid to reporting the crash, they said. they’re afraid they will be blacklisted,” talk because they are scared to lose their “We were asked to come in and go to said Mitsuo Nakamura, a former day la- jobs,” said Hayashi. “But Japan can’t con- work quickly,” an executive of Denko Keibi bourer who runs a group set up to protect tinue to ignore this problem forever.” said, apologising to the workers, who later Fukushima workers. “You have to remember won compensation of about $6,000 each these people often can’t get any other job.” Additional reporting by Kevin Krolicki, Sophie for unpaid wages. “In hindsight, this is not Hayashi’s experiences at the plant Knight and Chris Meyers in Tokyo and Yoshiyuki something an amateur should have gotten turned him into an activist. He was re- Osada in Osaka; Editing By Bill Tarrant involved in.” assigned to a construction site outside In the arbitration session Reuters at- Tokyo by his second employer after he FOR MORE INFORMATION tended, Denko Keibi said there had been posted an online video about his first ex- Mari Saito, Japan energy correspondent problems with working conditions but said periences in the plant in late 2012. After a [email protected] it was still examining what happened in the tabloid magazine published a story about Antoni Slodkowski, Japan correspondent December accident. Hayashi, his managers asked him to leave. [email protected] The Denko Keibi case is unusual because He has since moved to Tokyo and filed a Bill Tarrant, Enterprise Editor of the large number of workers involved, complaint with the labour standards office. [email protected] the labour union that won the settlement He volunteered in the successful parlia- Michael Williams, Global Enterprise Editor said. Many workers are afraid to speak out, mentary campaign of former actor turned [email protected]

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