Sadakichi Nozawa

Sadakichi Nozawa is a former nuclear-plant worker whose recognition of a police sketch gives Shuhei Matsumiya a crucial lead in the search for Kazutoshi Yokoyama. Nozawa remembers working alongside Yokoyama and identifies him not by the photograph of Seizo Naemura but by the sketch; his account also connects Yokoyama to a low-tier contractor called Watabe, placing an elusive identity within the fragmented labor system of nuclear-plant maintenance.

Identity and Background

Investigators located Nozawa while tracing men who had worked alongside Kazutoshi Yokoyama at Hamaoka Nuclear Power Station and Onagawa Nuclear Power Station. They had found an address for him but no telephone number, so Matsumiya went to his modest, aging apartment building near Shinmaruko Station without arranging an appointment. Nozawa had worked at Hamaoka a long time earlier and recalled living in the same place as Yokoyama, where the two regularly encountered one another.

Nozawa’s recollections come from a working life organized around temporary placements rather than a stable home or employer. In a later account, a nuclear-plant laborer explains that workers such as himself moved among sites, staying for months in company dormitories before being sent elsewhere. He describes the work as a day-labor arrangement sustained by small subcontractors and still lower-level subcontractors. The evidence identifies that account as part of the investigation’s reconstruction of the industry, not as a direct statement attributed to Nozawa; it nevertheless supplies the employment context in which investigators found him and sought his memory of Yokoyama.

Matsumiya’s Visit and the Identification

At Nozawa’s apartment, Matsumiya first showed him a photograph of Seizo Naemura. Nozawa rejected it: the pictured man did not resemble the coworker he remembered. This negative identification mattered because the investigators had focused on Naemura as a possible connection among people in the case, but testimony elsewhere had already weakened that line of inquiry. Nozawa’s response distinguished a mistaken candidate from the person Matsumiya was actually trying to identify.

Matsumiya then presented an artist’s sketch, explaining that it had been made recently and that the person’s appearance might have changed since Nozawa knew him. Nozawa studied it and recognized the man as Yokoyama, recalling him as consistently grim and saying he could not remember seeing him smile. The match echoed an earlier recognition by Yasuyo Miyamoto. Although Nozawa’s identification alone did not settle the case, Matsumiya regarded the convergence as strong confirmation that his reasoning was on course.

Yokoyama, Watabe, and Nuclear-Plant Work

Nozawa clarified that he and Yokoyama had worked different jobs at Onagawa. Nozawa was employed by a specialist power-generation subcontractor; Yokoyama worked for Watabe, another subcontractor far down the contracting chain. Nozawa described the Watabe crew as the group that ended up with the most dangerous assignments. His distinction between the companies and their jobs gave investigators a concrete organizational link between Yokoyama and the name Watabe, rather than merely another recollection of a face.

The broader investigation explains why such a link was difficult to follow through official records. The companies involved were numerous, often small, and arranged in extended networks of contractors and subcontractors. Records for former workers were scarce: employers were generally required to preserve employee documents for only three years in circumstances that did not cover many short-term workers. Investigators also learned that false names and forged residence documents could be used in this labor market, while the records of smaller firms became still harder to pursue after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami prompted some to leave the business.

Radiation-related work offered a further, imperfect means of checking identities. The task force had confirmed that neither Shunichi Watabe nor Mutsuo Koshikawa appeared in the registration files for radiation-controlled work at Hamaoka. Yet investigators could not rule out work elsewhere under those names, and Nozawa’s recollection placed Yokoyama with the Watabe subcontractor at Onagawa. The gap between those findings shows why the inquiry had to combine documents, workplace testimony, and visual recognition instead of treating any single record as conclusive.

Narrative Role and Significance

Nozawa functions as a witness whose value lies in a precise distinction: the photograph is not Yokoyama, but the sketch is. His remembered encounters, shared lodging, and account of the Watabe subcontractor turn an abstract search across old employment networks into a testable lead. The exchange also demonstrates the investigation’s method of comparing candidate identities against different kinds of evidence, rather than allowing an existing suspicion to dictate what a witness sees.

His testimony belongs to a larger portrait of precarious nuclear maintenance labor. The subcontracting chain dispersed responsibility among companies, while temporary jobs and short retention periods left few durable records. In that setting, a worker’s recollection could recover a connection that institutional files did not preserve. Nozawa does not resolve the whole identity mystery by himself, but his recognition helps Matsumiya connect Yokoyama to Watabe’s crew and advances the effort to reconstruct how the missing man had lived and worked under uncertain names.