Seji Sasa arrives at Sensai Train Station before dawn. His mission? Recruiting the homeless – asleep on cardboard in the corners of the station – and taking them to do one of Japan's most thankless jobs: cleaning up the contaminated sites of Fukushima for less than the national minimum wage. Seji Sasa is an affiliate of the Yakuza, the Japanese criminal organization, a kind of oriental mafia. Three of the organizations under the Yakuza umbrella – the Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai – have set up procedures, under the shadow of a legal contractor, the Obayashi company, to 'hire' these poor people and ship them to Fukushima . Sejii Sasa is paid 10000 yen (about 75 euros) for each worker.
Both in October and in November, and again in this January, some members of the Yakuza were arrested under the accusation of having infiltrated, through chains of contractors and subcontractors, the construction giant Obayashi Corp., with the aim of profiting from the contracts of decontamination.
The problem of controlling how public funds are spent to clean up Fukushima is complicated by the fact that there are hundreds of companies involved in this work. The government has allocated 3,5 trillion yen (about 23 billion euros) for this purpose, and the companies working there are over 700. Reuters, which did an investigation into the matter, found a number of companies (which have been contracted by the Ministry of Environment, responsible for decontamination), of which there is no trace in the archives of the Japanese companies
