We occasionally still get some news about the Fukushima nuclear disaster which, of course, happened 200 years ago and is of no interest at all in our current news cycle. Most of it truly sucks.
He isn't a social worker. He's a recruiter. The men in Sendai Station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan's nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a head. "This is how labor recruiters like me come in every day," Sasa says, as he strides past men sleeping on cardboard and clutching at their coats against the early winter cold. It's also how Japan finds people willing to accept minimum wage for one of the most undesirable jobs in the industrialized world: working on the $35 billion, taxpayer-funded effort to clean up radioactive fallout.
Below these official subcontractors, a shadowy network of gangsters and illegal brokers who hire homeless men has also become active in Fukushima. Ministry of Environment contracts in the most radioactive areas of Fukushima prefecture are particularly lucrative because the government pays an additional $100 in hazard allowance per day for each worker.
It really is time. Japan cannot or will not confront the extent of this disaster, nor will it be honest about it with the rest of the world. Fukushima is having severe consequences far from the site of the catastrophe. Great parts of the Pacific are dying. This is a world calamity, and the answer on the ground is for gangsters to round up the indigent every morning and put them to work scrubbing the radiation out of the rocks. This is not enough. It is time for TEPCO and for Japan to get out of the way.
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