August 21, 2015
https://archive.is/3JHUO
>The cleanup efforts in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in northern Japan have revealed the plight of the Japanese unemployed, marginally employed day laborers and the homeless. They are called the “precariat,” Japan’s proletariat, living precariously on the knife-edge of the work world, without full employment or job security. They are derided as “glow in the dark boys,” “jumpers” (one job to another) and “nuclear gypsies.” They have even been dubbed “burakumin,” a hostile term for Japan’s untouchables, members of the lowest rung on the ladder in Japanese society.
>They are unskilled and virtually untrained and are the nuclear decontamination workers recruited by Japanese gangsters, Yakuza, to make Fukushima in northern Japan livable again. These jobs are some of the most dangerous and undesirable jobs in the industrialized world, a $35 billion, taxpayer-funded effort to clean up radioactive fallout across an area of northern Japan larger than Hong Kong. Reuters and the L.A. Times have both described the project as an unprecedented effort.
>Reuters made a direct comparison between Fukushima and the Chernobyl “incident.” Unlike Ukraine and the 1986 nuclear “accident” at Chernobyl, where authorities declared a 1,000 square-mile no-habitation zone, resettled 350,000 people and allowed radiation to take care of itself, Japan is attempting to make the Fukushima region livable again.
Continues in the article.
http://www.internationalpolicydigest.org/2015/08/21/japan-s-nuclear-gypsies-the-homeless-jobless-and-fukushima/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150825000811/http://www.internationalpolicydigest.org/2015/08/21/japan-s-nuclear-gypsies-the-homeless-jobless-and-fukushima/