"I'd see it every time I went over, and I knew that flag was important to him, even though he never talked about the war. We never knew where he got the flag, but we knew he'd been through some really heavy combat."
"It's called a good luck flag - every Japanese soldier carried one into battle, signed by family and friends in their village. The flags were known in Japan as Yosegaki Hinomaru, interpreted as 'a collection of writing under the red sun.'"
"Allied soldiers often kept the flags after, per army protocol, they'd searched the bodies of dead combatants... I started to realize a while back that maybe it wasn't the best home decor."
"I was thinking of having the flag cleaned and restored when a friend told me there was a movement underway to reunite good luck flags with the ancestors of Japanese soldiers who were killed during World War II."
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