The Fukushima nuclear crisis of March 2011 revealed many unsavory truths about the Japanese press, the nuclear power industry and the government’s so-called nuclear regulatory agencies that had lay hidden and mostly unreported for decades here in Japan.

But recently we have been getting a close-up look at just how arrogant the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), has been in dealing with the Japanese public — and indeed the world — in this post-Fukushima age we now live in.

If there were any doubts before about TEPCO’s true face and motivations regarding the Fukushima nuclear crisis, consider some of these more recent Japanese news reports about what TEPCO is really up to and what its real priorities are:

• A story in the Mainichi newspaper a few months back revealed that in September 2011, six months after the Fukushima accident, TEPCO began making compensation payments as ordered by the Japanese government to residents in the Fukushima area who were directly affected by the nuclear accident. However, a month later, TEPCO ordered its own employees who lived in that area not to submit any such claims for compensation for the time being. Many of those TEPCO employees who did as they were told have not received one yen in compensation from the company since then.

• TEPCO announced in February of this year that it would bypass Japanese government guidelines and stop paying any compensation to local Fukushima-area residents whose ability to work has been affected by the Fukushima accident. Starting in early 2015, such persons will no longer receive a single yen in compensation from TEPCO. The company cited an “improvement in the employment climate” of Japan generally as the reason behind the compensation cut-off.

• It was reported just this week that since 2011, TEPCO has rejected more than 20 claims for compensation by its own employees, refusing to reach any kind of out-of-court settlement. And what does the TEPCO workers’ union plan to do about that? Not a thing. “Because compensation is an issue to be handled by individuals, the union has no plans to negotiate with the company,” the union said.

• Only last month, about 100 contracted laborers who had been working for TEPCO demonstrated outside the company’s headquarters in downtown Tokyo. These are workers who were recruited by outside labor agents (and no doubt by Japanese mafia syndicates as well) to do highly dangerous work at the crippled Fukushima plant with few meaningful safety precautions and no extra monetary allowance. They claimed they were cheated by both the labor agents and TEPCO.

• And if we look a little farther back in time, we see that just a few months ago in late 2013, TEPCO refused to reimburse the government’s Environment Ministry for the more than 30 billion yen spent on decontaminating land in the Fukushima area that had been covered by radioactive fallout from the nuclear accident. The Japanese government, for its part, seemed to be going along with TEPCO’s haughty refusal to compensate Japanese taxpayers for the whole Fukushima nuclear mess.

Human resources are supposed to be a company’s most valuable asset and human citizens most definitely are what make governments work. But what happens when those very institutions turn their backs on the people who work for them and who pay taxes to public agencies to protect them? Fukushima, among many other things, has showed us some very ugly answers to such questions.

The true face of TEPCO is the face of the nuclear power industry as whole, both within and outside of Japan: the face of an arrogant, closed, almost evil profit-making system that seems drunk on its own power to make and break lives — a system that could not give a damn about human loss, human injury or human sacrifice.

There are laws on the books to prosecute and punish individual citizens for contaminating or polluting the local environment in their communities. Is it not time that we did the same to institutions like TEPCO, whose pollution has damaged the Earth’s environment possibly permanently? I, for one, would like to see these kinds of arrogant institutions and officials put on trial to directly face their accusers — the whole human race.