Tax included or not?

One confusing factor about Japan is that sometimes labeled prices include 8% consumption tax and sometimes it doesn't. I'm pretty sure that the law changed sometime in our early years in Japan to make it compulsory to indicate if a price includes the consumption tax or not. I wish they'd just make it like Australia and ensure that it is always included, that would eliminate any confusion.

In any case, I only discovered the other week how it is written on labels (yes, very ignorant shopper here!).

Check out these examples.

The circled characters mean that tax is included in this price.

The circled character means tax isn't included in this price.

I don't know what all the circled characters mean, but
I'm pretty sure that the sale price here is the red price.