Flag of Japan

How to read it

The Act on National Flag and Anthem (Act No. 127 of 1999), in force since 13 August 1999, says the national flag is the Nisshōki (日章旗), the official name for the Hinomaru. Its schedule fixes the height at two thirds of the length, a disc three fifths of the height across, centred on the flag, a white field and a red disc, in the shade the law calls beni (紅色). A transitional rule lets flags be made, for the time being, with the height seven tenths of the length and the disc moved towards the pole by one hundredth of the length. The same act repealed the Merchant Ship Regulations, a Council of State proclamation of 1870 that had made the Hinomaru the flag of Japanese merchant ships.

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Telling it from Bangladesh’s flag

Bangladesh’s flag also has a red disc, on a bottle green field instead of white. Its flag rules of 1972, as Banglapedia gives them, set it at 10:6, with a disc whose radius is a fifth of the flag’s length and whose centre is nine twentieths of the way along the flag, so the disc sits slightly off centre. Japan’s disc is centred, and three fifths of the height across.

Which red

The law says only “beni”, red, and gives no exact shade, Nippon.com notes. When Fukiura Tadamasa made the flags for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, he said deciding the red was the hardest part: with the Japan Color Research Institute and Shiseido’s research laboratory he collected 500 flags from ordinary households and chose the most common shade.

From ship’s flag to national flag

The shogunate made the Hinomaru Japan’s ensign in August 1854, to tell Japanese ships from foreign ones. In February 1870 the new Meiji government recognised it officially, but only as the flag of merchant ships, and it served as the country’s flag in practice for the next 129 years. Nippon.com traces the design to sun worship: in Japanese legend Amaterasu, the sun goddess, is the ancestor of the emperors. The government said in June 1999 that the flag’s origins are not fully known. Nippon.com gives one reason the law came so late: public feeling that tied the flag to the militarism of the war years, and in a government poll in 1964, 22% said it made them think of the war. The Prime Minister’s statement on the day the act passed, 9 August 1999, said the flag and anthem had long been established as customary law and that the act put no new obligation on the public.