Hell correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the most infamous examples of this that the government refuses to admit the unit 731 existed?

When I was in uni, a Japanese friend told me Korean comfort women are cash grabbers and Japan has done enough even though it is "in the past".

I don’t think it’s that worse than other countries tbh. It’s amplified by the fact that it’s an island so foreigners are scarce and a lot of them are there for weeb tourism and may not be the best to interact with, but racism is a constant in most countries all around the world.

They do need to acknowledge their war crimes though, sure. I agree Nationalism is definitely a bigger issue in Japan than in most other countries.

So, I knew a girl who went to a Japanese international school in my South East Asian home country where the Japanese did some utterly horrendous things during WWII. She told me the school took them to a war museum kinda place on a field trip and basically shouted at them like "LOOK AT WHAT YOUR PEOPLE DID!" until the whole room of grade school kids were crying about how sorry they were. So at least outside of Japan there seems to be some (perhaps over the top) education about the atrocities committed by the Japanese government to Japanese students, but I agree, most of the Japan educated Japanese people I've spoken to are just vaguely aware that they did some bad stuff before they got nuked.

stopped after WWII

That's what they and the Western governments legitimizing hyper-nationalist holocaust-deniers like Abe for geopolitical reasons want you to think, but in reality there's still a lot of fuckery going on, to use the technical term.

Well the 12th century and the Sengoku period were probably worse than the early Meiji period in terms of violence.