Japan police arrest mobster in Fukushima clean-up

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese police have arrested a high-ranking  yakuza over claims he sent workers to Fukushima for the radiological clean-up  without a licence, the first arrest of a mobster in connection with the nuclear plant.

Officers in northern Yamagata prefecture were quizzing Yoshinori Arai, a 40-year-old senior member of a local yakuza group affiliated to the  Sumiyoshi-kai crime syndicate, a police spokesman said Thursday.

Arai allegedly dispatched three men to Fukushima to work on clean-up crews in November last year, he said.

Under Japanese law, a government licence is required by anyone who acts as an employment agent.

Arai is also suspected of sending people to work on the construction of  temporary housing in the tsunami-hit northeast, the spokesman said.

Arai reportedly told police that he intended to profit from the scheme by taking a cut of the workers’ wages. Those employed at Fukushima earn more than others in similar work because of the potentially hazardous nature of the job.

It was the first arrest of a mobster linked to Fukushima clean-up, the  police spokesman said.  A Japanese journalist who worked at the crippled nuclear plant months after the accident in March 2011 has claimed that Japan’s yakuza are involved in  supplying clean-up crews.

The journalist, Tomohiko Suzuki, told AFP the crime groups have long sent debtors to nuclear power plants as a way of paying off loans made at sky-high rates.