Japan Press Weekly

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2013 November 27 - December 3 [CIVIL RIGHTS]

Nuclear Fuel Company colludes with police in monitoring employees using excuse of antiterrorism

The Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC, currently the Japan Atomic Energy Agency) in the 1970s monitored and investigated its employees to interfere in union activities and isolate unionists in collusion with police under the guise of antiterrorism. This came out in materials that Akahata investigators obtained.

What Akahata obtained was information in archives kept by the late Nishimura Shigeo who served as a deputy director for the PNC’s general affairs division. They reveal ways that the PNC used to control unions at the corporation and win local residents opposing nuclear power generation over to the pro-nuke side.

The archives included a list containing the names of 150 employees at the PNC Tokai Office in Ibaraki Prefecture. In the list, allegedly compiled by the Tokai Office around 1981, the company graded the 150 employees from A to C and colorcoded them to indicate if they were a Japanese Communist Party member or a union member.

On the list, the company wrote how close each worker is with union activists in the workplace, with a brief note indicating that the information was obtained from the Ibaraki Prefectural Police and the Public Security Intelligence Agency.

Sekita Masamitsu, 73, was one of the 150 employees on the list. He said, “One of my colleagues, who was a union member, told me he was visited by an Ibaraki Police detective when he was at a hotel during a business trip.”

The officer said to Sekita’s co-worker that nuclear facilities should be protected from terrorists and asked him “Do you know anyone who might to be a terrorist?,” Sekita remembered.

He said, “It is obvious that PNC informed the police about its employees. At that time, the police frequently intruded into union activities. The PNC management together with the police tried to hinder an aggressive union in the company from working representing the workers, I think.”

Under a secrets protection law which classifies anti-terrorism information as confidential, the police would conduct arbitrary investigations and monitor civil movements.