TEPCO has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the nation of Japan: cronyism, collusion, gentrification, corruption, weak regulation, and entropy. Despite being in the spotlight for the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, TEPCO continues to engage in questionable labor practices, and has escaped bankruptcy in closed-door meetings with politicians, and through denying culpability has shifted part of the reparations burden onto taxpayers – deeds which testify to the extent to which TEPCO still has plenty of political power, if not as much nuclear power.

After an expose in the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun, last week TEPCO admitted that 69 of its plant workers can’t be located for radiation checks—30 of them were found not even to have had their names recorded. This raises questions about how these workers were recruited, paid, monitored for radiation exposure, or vetted before entering the site of the nuclear disaster. Former and current workers within the plant testify that many of the hired hands are yakuza or ex-yakuza members. One company supplying the firm with contract workers is a known Japanese mafia front company. TEPCO when questioned would only say, “We don’t have knowledge of who is ultimately supplying the labor at the end of the outsourcing. We do not have organized crime exclusionary clauses in our standard contracts but are considering it.” The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) has asked the company to “submit a report” on the matter.

TEPCO is often asked to submit reports. In fact, nine days before the meltdown, on March 2, NISA issued TEPCO a warning for their failure to inspect key pieces of equipment at the plant, and wanted a report on the matter by June 2. The report does not appear to have been received yet.

A dark history

For months, TEPCO has been insisting that the cause of the nuclear disaster was the “unprecedented” tidal wave which flooded the emergency generators, delaying cooling. Katsunobu Onda, the investigative journalist who wrote the recently reissued expose TEPCO: The Dark Empire (東京電力・帝国の暗黒 ) in 2007, felt a strange sense of déjà vu when listening to the claim that this accident was “unforseeable” (soteigai) at the initial press conferences. “It was the exact same phrase trotted out in July of 2007, when a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Niigata resulted in leakage of radiation from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, and a fire which TEPCO was unable to quickly extinguish,” he notes. The possibility of a tidal wave causing a nuclear meltdown was not unforeseeable either; members of the Fukushima Diet (the local legislature) had warned the company as early as 2007.

TEPCO, originally a public utility until it went private in 1951, has enjoyed over half a century of lax government regulation, a default monopoly status in the power industry (and the security that accompanies such a position), and finally an increasingly untouchable image, fortified by every scandal that goes virtually unpunished.Despite its many accidents, TEPCO has managed to shield itself over the years from rigorous investigation and censure. It has done so by wining and dining the Japanese media, spending the equivalent of $294 million in advertising, and hiring retired National Police Agency bureaucrats and former METI officials as “special advisors.” Using political connections, threats, and a complacent press, they have managed to stay in business.