"TEPCO's involvement with anti-social forces and their inability to filter them out of the work-place is a national security issue. It is one reason that increasingly in the Diet we are talking de facto nationalization of the company. Nuclear energy shouldn't be in the hands of the yakuza. They're gamblers and an intelligent person doesn't want them to have atomic dice to play with."
[emphasis mine]
The above quote is from the first paragraph of an article published today by The Atlantic Wire by investigative journalist Jake Adelstein: The Yakuza and the Nuclear Mafia: Nationalization Looms for TEPCO.
In June The Atlantic reported that yakuza were involved at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reservation as members of cleanup crews and general labor. Yakuza "expert" Tomohiko Suzuki has reported extensively on the "nuclear business-industrial-political and media complex" in Japan - commonly referred to as the "Nuclear Mafia," and has published a new book this month entitled Yakuza and the Nuclear Industry: Diary of an Undercover Reporter Working at the Fukushima Plant.
Ties between the Japanese nuclear industry and organized crime have been well known since the 1990s, and some insiders say the relationship goes back decades. According to the Japanese National Police Agency, many of the subcontractors to subcontractors working for TEPCO are known yakuza front companies. At least 140 workers at Daiichi over the past 9 months were found to have used fake names to gain employment, and are presently "unaccounted for."
Laborers that the yakuza places in nuclear plants around Japan - and at Fukushima Daiichi since the meltdowns - are people who owe money or some other good they cannot pay to the yakuza. Suzuki says three of the "Fukushima Fifty" who stayed during the most dangerous days were local yakuza bosses and soldiers, no doubt earning macho points for respect in their organized criminal outfits.
The Atlantic article is about what the Japanese government is planning to do about the situation, as TEPCO goes deeper and deeper into the hole with billions of yen in outstanding claims for damages against the company. The government will have to end up paying out those damages if TEPCO goes under (and even if it doesn't), and they wish to ensure that the public doesn't end up supporting the yakuza directly.
The same Japanese Senator who offered the opening quote in this diary was asked what the major differences were between the yakuza's various corporate fronts and TEPCO…
"The primary difference […] is they have different corporate logos. They both are essentially criminal organizations that place profits above the safety and welfare of the residents where they operate; they both exploit their workers. On the other hand, the yakuza may care more about what happens where they operate because many of them live there. For Tokyo Electric Power Company, Fukushima is just the equivalent of a parking lot."
Wow.