The Fiscal Commission story and prehistory call for a revision to prevalent understandings of international tax history. The development of international tax law could well have taken a very different turn had the Commission not been eliminated. Startling parallels and lessons of the Commission story remain pertinent amid the revival of global multilateral cooperation under the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting.

The Abe administration had two goals with regard to historical legacy issues: to enrich national pride through historical revisionism; and to change the global narrative of Japan as perpetrator. Unfortunately, these goals were fundamentally incompatible. Further, they failed to take into account that public memorialization today is not only the purview of the state. It has democratized to include various domestic, transnational, and international actors. Through case studies of comfort women, Yasukuni Shrine, and Pearl Harbor, this chapter explores the degree of success for the Abe administration in achieving its goals in each of these areas and what the enduring challenges are that make these goals difficult to achieve.

Zainichi Koreans have been at the core of debates around hate speech in Japan. They may be the key to understanding the causal relations that produce hate speech. This chapter aims to clarify what is behind hate speech in Japan by examining why Zainichi Koreans are targeted by hate groups. It first focuses on the effect of Japan’s former colonial rule and the cold war on Koreans resident in Japan, and it finds two things: Japan enjoyed a prolonged postcolonial settlement, and the legal status of this group was determined by triadic relations. The chapter then considers the timing of the recent rise of hate groups, which has occurred long after open discrimination against Zainichi Koreans had diminished and their socioeconomic disadvantage had all but disappeared. Instead, it seems that hate speech has accompanied the proliferation of historical revisionism and worsening relations between Japan and neighbouring countries in the 2000s. Zainichi Koreans became the targets of hate speech because they were seen as belonging to a different regime. The chapter therefore concludes that Japan’s nativism and its accompanying hate speech should be understood as a variant of the historical revisionism that tries to justify Japan’s prewar imperialism.