From the Asahi Shimbun -
Acknowledging a link between leukemia and exposure to radiation from the nuclear accident, the health ministry has awarded workers' compensation to a former worker at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant for the first time.
The worker was engaged in construction and welding operations near the units 3 and 4 reactors between 2012 and 2013. He was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia - an aggressive form of the disease - in January of 2014. TEPCO reported his accumulated dose as 16 millisieverts while at the Fukushima facility, and 4 millisieverts during a 3-month stint at Kyushu Electric Power Company's Genkai plant, also in 2012. Of course, TEPCO has earned a notorious reputation for 'fudging' on dose records at the Daiichi facility, and in many cases early on refusing to give dosimeters to the workers at all.
In the NYTimes article notes...
Plant workers face a different magnitude of risk. Tepco has been criticized for the sometimes sloppy training and protection it has offered cleanup workers at Fukushima, many of whom are unskilled and hired through arm's-length subcontractors and labor brokers. A government examination of the utility's safety practices in 2013 found it had underreported the radiation exposure of a third of the workers whose records were reviewed by inspectors.
In fact, those "arms-length subcontractors and labor brokers" are often the Japanese organized crime outfits known as the Yakuza. And according to some sources, somewhere between 800 and 1200 Yakuza-supplied laborers at Daiichi have gone 'missing' and no one seems to know what happened to them.
TEPCO and the Nuclear Mafia
Strange Bedfellows? Nukes and Organized Crime
The Japanese Labor Standards Inspection Office concluded the state should pay compensation after consulting with the ministry of health. The insurance standards for nuclear workers suffering radiation related conditions kicks in at a dose of 5 millisieverts.
So far 8 workers at Daiichi since 2011 have applied for workers' comp after developing diseases associated with radiation exposure. Three of those were rejected, one withdrew the application. Three are under current consideration. Per TEPCO's own records, 21,000 of the 45,000 people who have worked at Daiichi since the disaster began have accumulated more than 5 millisieverts (as of the end of August, 2015).
More than 9,000 Daiichi recovery workers have received doses of 20 mSv or more, prompting Asahi to note that "It is therefore expected that the number of applications for workers' compensation related to the Fukushima disaster will surge in the near future."
It's been just four and a half years since the disaster. Already there's an epidemic of thyroid cancer in area children, and there will be many more cases of leukemia in workers (leukemia usually being among the first radiogenic cancer to appear in an exposed population). All this will go nowhere but up, even as Tepco and the Japanese government try to force evacuees to return to their contaminated homes and towns so they can save on compensation payments. Thereby demonstrating yet again that no matter how bad things get, some things never change.