of Tokyo. On board, a band of plain clothed immigration officers.

They're working on a tip off. Their targets are illegal immigrants who overstayed their

visas or entered the country illegally.

Have you got visas?

Did all of you come by ship?

Instead of the two illegal Chinese workers they expect to find here, there are six, all smuggled

into the country by ship. It's a rare moment of satisfaction, raids like this are virtually

an everyday occurrence. But these immigration officers are acutely aware they're merely

chipping away at a vast hidden mass of humanity. As fast as they catch them, there are more

to take their place.

The immigration bureau cannot solve the problem alone. We need the

cooperation of the various government agencies, and also with those countries from where we

have the so many people coming. Immigration officials raid as much as they

Immigration officials raid as much as they can but the reality is they don't have enough staff to catch them all.

Really, I think what they're doing is nothing but a drop in the ocean.

This is Japan's frontline defence against the tide of illegal workers coming into the

country. A patrol squad from the Maritime Safety Agency.

The constant run of shipping traffic makes it virtually impossible for

teams like this to monitor all vessels.

The Shun An Xing is a Chinese cargo ship that docked before dawn.

Immigration We're going to conduct an inspection from this point on.Okay.

Even if there were stowaways, they're long gone by the time we board mid-morning. Still,

they comb the ship looking for telltale signs -- fresh paint, new bolts -- anything that

tells them of a secret compartment big enough to hide a body. Of all the illegal workers

who enter Japan, smuggling by ship is by far the most popular among the Chinese, who account

for 95 percent of the hundreds of stowaways already caught this year.

In 1997 there was a big increase in illegal entries. Last year it decreased a bit but this year

it will peak. Probably it will break the record of 1997.

Many come and work at restaurants washing dishes and waitressing. Many do cleaning jobs too --

like cleaning buildings. In the entertainment districts like Kabukicho

the women work as hostesses.

Chinese author and investigative journalist,

Mo Bang Fu, has long reported on the Chinese gangs that wallow in the trade of illegal

immigrants into Japan. Chinese gangs called Snakeheads have moved

in and now work hand in hand with the Japanese Mafia, the Yakuza.

The Snakeheads are trying to make more money illegally

namely by arranging smuggling. In order to attract a lot of customers as stowaways

they're discounting their fees for a successful smuggling attempt.

In some case they cut the fee by as much as half.

Chinese living in Japan face entrenched racism and distrust, and yet a blind eye is often

turned to illegal Chinese workers because of the jobs they do -- the so called 3D jobs.

Work that's dangerous, dirty or difficult.

This is the biggest haul of amphetamines ever made in Japan -- 616 kilograms have been uncovered.

Police and maritime safety officials have arrested one Japanese and eight non-Japanese including Taiwanese.

Now, however, that tolerance is running out as Japan discovers it has imported more than

cheap labour. According to Fukuoka police the suspect "Ho"

and others were caught at 9p.m. last night trying to smuggle the amphetamines onto Kurose

beach, in Kagoshima prefecture. They're suspected of violating Japan's control laws.

Two mainland Chinese and five Taiwanese Chinese have been arrested in this, Japan's biggest

drug bust. It's part of a growing crime wave involving

illegal immigrants. At first the crimes were only conducted against

At first the crimes were only conducted against

other Chinese but lately the targets have increasingly been Japanese. The next move

has been to make money fast through robbery, abduction and murder -- which they're now doing.

Japan has realised this cheap labour is not

worth the social cost.

The demand for all these immigration bureau has been so drastically, quickly increased,

and of course although we could increase the number of personnel of our bureau, it could

not catch up with the demand side. So still we have the gap.

Short staffed, under funded -- these problems

are compounded by a law enforcement system in which agencies simply don't talk enough.

Police, immigration, Maritime Safety Agency, Foreign Affairs -- illegal immigrants are

slipping through the gaps in communication. There are a number of bottlenecks in establishing

very efficient system, among all the government departments concerned.

So at the moment they're not cooperating as well as they could?

Well we are, we are of course cooperating, but the means of our communication, of course,

is not so, well, highly sophisticated everywhere.

Japan's 300,000 or so illegal immigrants are

not so hard to find. It took us a couple of weeks, one or two connections, and a finder's

fee that went to a middleman introduced to me only as Mr. Chin.

He brought me to an apartment to meet one such immigrant -- 38 year Lin Hui.

Lin lives in this one room, two and a half metres by nine metres, with four other men,

all of them smuggled into Japan. Lin has been here six and a half years.

I heard many people earned money easily in Japan.

My neighbours who came back from Japan became rich -- that's why I came to Japan.

Snakeheads organised his passage and they don't take poor Chinese. His fee was equivalent

to $35,000 Australian. It was a perilous voyage.

An agreement was made to pay within a week

but if I hadn't paid sooner, I'd have been beaten to death.

He's found plenty of work, much of it in the construction industry, which asks no tricky

questions about passports and visas, and always wants cheap labour. He's paid for his passage,

built a new three storey house and furnished it for his wife and two children back in Fuchien

Province. From the bottom of my heart, I want to go

home -- but it wasn't easy to come to Japan. Whenever I go out drinking with my friends

they often say they want to go home -- and I feel the same. When I think about it calmly

though, I know it was so hard to get to Japan that I want to be patient enough to stay here a bit longer.

Tens of thousands of illegal workers secretly

live this way, he says.

In the old days we could make a lot of money

but now it's becoming difficult. Now I tell them at home not to come. But they don't believe me.

One important area in which we have been working

is to keep in close touch with the Chinese authorities, encouraging

the authorities there to send out a very clear message that this is something which is firstly

illegal, and secondly, very dangerous.

The message doesn't seem to be getting through in China. Daily, more risk their lives on

the hazardous journey by sea. These men, shown here in an Immigration Department

video, were lucky. They were caught by officials. A group of eight Chinese were not so lucky

last summer -- they perished in the appalling heat in containers sitting on the dock just

like this. Their bodies were found days later.

If Japan has finally realised the need to

step up its own efforts, it has had little success convincing China to stop the flow

at its origins. There have been intensive consultations

at diplomatic level, consular consultations and so forth, but we expect that very soon

we'll have in place regular consultation between the law enforcement authorities of our two

governments, and the idea is to ask for their cooperation in imposing stricter control.

Look closer however, and there's no timetable for this new law enforcement cooperation.

No real plan on how to stop the likes of these men coming in.

Five of the six have been here a year or less; they haven't earned enough money to pay the

Chinese gang that smuggled them in, and they're panicking at the prospect of what awaits them

at home when they're deported. How else will five of them pay back the fee

they owe to Snakeheads if they don't return to Japan to work. How else will they hold

the hope of making a better life for their families in China, if not with money made

in Japan. When their Japanese is better and their clothes

and appearance look like everyone else's in town, they won't stand out as suspicious in

this society. You won't be able to tell at a glance whether

they're Japanese or Chinese. At the immigration detention centre, where

they're taken, queues of hundreds of illegal immigrants form outside every single day.

It's like a scene from the United Nations. People of every race, colour and nationality.

These are the workers immigration officials failed to find. When they'd made their money,

or are too homesick to stay, they present themselves to authorities to be willingly

deported. They face no penalty. Japan is simply thankful to see them go.

Many will be back. Immigration officials see the same faces time and time again in the

endless round of raids. There is simply too much money to be made in Japan, too many dirty

jobs the Japanese don't want to do, and too few immigration officers to catch them.

So long at their continues to be a market in Japan for cheap unskilled labour, then

the smuggling of illegal immigrants will go on.