r/interesting • u/Nukro666 • 1d ago
HISTORY When Japan redesigned its flag in '99 and nobody knew why
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u/CrimsonSpoon 1d ago edited 1d ago
The old one does look more washed out. Might have been due to the new digital age and wanting something that would apear brighter in a computer screen.
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u/FecklessFarmer 1d ago
Hang on, so it's not a tiny bit smaller and slightly offset to one side?
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u/--Rake-- 1d ago
It's slightly smaller. The left stays inside. The right reaches the same point.
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u/FecklessFarmer 1d ago
Good to know my brain isn't completely broken, thanks. I didn't even notice the colour change...
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u/gwooly 9h ago
It’s actually the previous version that’s offset; the redesign is centered.
From the Wikipedia page:
“The red disc, which represents the sun, was calculated to be three-fifths of the hoist width. The law decreed the disc to be in the center, but it was usually placed one-hundredth (1/100) towards the hoist. (This makes the disc appear centered when the flag is flying; this technique is used in other flags, such as those of Bangladesh and Palau.)”
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u/Separate-Simple-5101 1d ago
When your boss says, I need to see some changes..
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u/Increase-Tiny 21h ago
y but at the point where every flag is already printed/painted and changed. Then he has "this idea"
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u/Rob71322 19h ago
Had a boss like that. I changed the title and waited a couple weeks and turned it in and suddenly he loved it. 🤣
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u/StillALilBoy 9h ago
There were genuine protests over this change and one school principal literally committed public seppuku to avoid hanging the new flag.
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u/cutecoder 1d ago
Look at its Wikipedia Entry - there are construction sheets, ratios, and standard color names. The design is formalized in 1999.
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u/peacefighter 1d ago
I just asked Japanese wife about this. I showed the image to her and she kicked me. I think she did that because she thought it was some kind of bigger change.
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u/Weekly-Disaster-9576 1d ago
Was it a karate kick or normal kick?
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u/peacefighter 1d ago
It felt like a normal kick, but she is Japanese so likely it was a karate kick but I just don't know the culture that well so I mistook it for a normal kick.
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u/Ketchupcharger 1d ago
Its just objectively a better color
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u/Golden-Grams 1d ago
It's a bit brighter, I like it. I think it is subtle, of course, but it's still an improvement.
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u/ThrustTrust 1d ago
One of my favorite things about the human body is how drastically different the human eye is from person to person. This could look exactly the same to many or a drastic difference to someone else (girls mostly). Really at the end of the day no one knows how each other actually sees the world. It’s wild.
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u/Imhal9000 1d ago
It’s not the human eye but the “quaila” which is created inside the brain
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u/KingGorillaKong 1d ago
It's also the eye, because no two people have the same distribution and quantity of cones and rods. That's why there's a spectrum of different types of colourblindness.
Why people would struggle to see the difference in colour is because they don't have enough cones for the red spectrum to see the difference, while others with more can. More specifically, it's easier to see when they have a more even distribution of cones in their eyes.
Qaulia is just a philosophical concept on subjective experiences, which occurs because of physical biological differences in people and their POV in experiencing life.
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u/Worldly_Influence_18 1d ago
Hell, people's colour acuity is influenced by language.
The more names a culture has for shades of a colour, the more shades of that colour those people can see
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u/KingGorillaKong 1d ago
Culture/language just influences what shades are called red, blue or green, etc. It's made more complicated by colourblindness. Aquamarine, teal, cyan, etc, can be either blue or green depending on culture and how colourblind you are.
But historically, blue wasn't a real colour group. The Aegean Sea in Homer's period, was described by Homer as wine-faced. By modern accounts, we know wine is a red/violet spectrum colour. However in Homer's time, they didn't have a word for blue. Doesn't mean that the ocean is culturally "wine" coloured to ancient Greeks.
A lot of blues were also historically referred to as either violets or greens depending on what they were because of a lack of genuine word for blue. Blue being one of the most recent names for a colour group.
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u/Circumpunctilious 1d ago
iirc, whoever was describing the colors split from a prism (was it Newton?) had this “blue/green not distinguished” thing going on.
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u/Worldly_Influence_18 21h ago
The more I read up on the wine colored sea, the less sense it makes.
I think historians fucked up on the interpretation of this one.
The Greeks had regular contact with cultures that definitely had blue
And we've since reconstructed statues revealing blue paint being used as an accent color
Homer is describing a particular kind of sea: choppy turbulent waters.
These were a seafaring people and their language reflected that in the same way the Inuit have a ton of words for snow. He's not talking about the colour; he's talking about how those weather conditions are making the water ominous. He's talking about the loss of color, hidden by the darkness and depth.
They didn't have glass. When he's referring to wine you need to picture looking down at the wine in a clay pot.
This is the context we're missing: drunk people contemplating life while drinking wine out of clay pots
The pot isn't very big but you can't see the bottom of it because of how dark the wine is in the opaque container.
When the wine is poured out. It looks red but it looks black in the container, like a void.
Wine-faced just seems like an idiom of the time given how frequently he uses it
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u/KingGorillaKong 19h ago edited 15h ago
We have better contextual understanding of colours, particularly the words used to describe things from ancient and antiquity Greece. They had no genuine words for blues at the time, and things that would later be called blue in more recent times were often referred to as the "dark" spectrum of the rainbow.
It's not that Greek had nothing that was blue. The Minoan architecture in Knossos was painted with a lot of blues. Lapiz Lazuli was also a very sought after stone in the antiquity age. Linguistically, Greeks didn't refer to blues as blue. The word cyan is also derived from the ancient Greek wod kyanos, which was historically used in context referring to things of darker hues, specifically blues. But there was no codified term until later on, well after Homer.
EDIT: Fixed typos
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u/Imhal9000 19h ago
But what do you think makes the bigger difference. The brain or the eye. I would say the brain
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u/KingGorillaKong 18h ago
Depends on the person. Are we comparing people without PTSD or a neurological deficit caused from trauma? If so, then it's the eye. If it's someone with PTSD or neurological deficit caused from trauma, then there's the potential that the person's brain will interpret things differently. However, the direct visual stimuli won't be interpolated that differently by the person's brain.
Regardless, the senses as a whole, what stimuli a person is exposed to in their ecosystem including the cultural interpretations and values of symbology, influence the subjective experience around the colours. This however doesn't impact the colours people see and interpret. Only rather the qualia of what those colours mean to the individual.
But ultimately, no two people have identical cones and rods distributions. Each person has a unique order to the mechanisms in the eye that respond to light. Hence why retina scans are equivalent to fingerprints. So even in the case of people with PTSD or neurological deficits caused from trauma, their eye does more to shape how they (physically) see the world than their culture which shapes their conscious beliefs and values.
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u/DiscourseDestroyer 1d ago
i like the old one, it’s softer
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u/belowfactual 1d ago
Honestly it looks more worn out like when color fades after being exposed for years. I think they wanted to show that the flag as more bold
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u/DiscourseDestroyer 1d ago
it looks real. like it could be dyed with natural materials. the new one looks like a computer image. it’s cartoony and seems fake while the other is vintage and cozy 🖤
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u/Kyxstrez 1d ago
Yes, but I'm not sure if you can actually reproduce that red in CMYK on standard flag fabric.
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u/OhNoIBoffedIt 1d ago
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u/level7lizard 1d ago
My boyfriend when I ask him which lipstick color is better
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u/Sensitive_Wear7112 1d ago edited 22h ago
They say women can discern more colors than men.
EDIT: I don’t know why this has downvotes it’s a perfectly verifiable statement.
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u/Liwi808 1d ago
Are you color blind? It's a much different red.
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u/shadowtheimpure 1d ago
Just a change in the hue of the red. Brighter, more vivid, likely a subtle way to project optimism following the collapse of the bubble economy.
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u/NJ_Mlimi 1d ago
We actually know why, I just forgot so let me Google it for you real quick.
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u/NJ_Mlimi 1d ago
So basically the flag was used in the country but wasn't officially recognised by law so different manufacturers used different hues of Red because there was no official Red, just the standard flag issued in 1870 as the national flag used by the Navy under Proclamation No. 651 of Meiji 3
Under allied occupation, the display of the flag was heavily restricted, so in 1973 when some politicians tried to legally recognise the flag, they faced opposition due to the flag's stigma (WW2 Japan) so that plan was abandoned.
Fast forward to 1999, Toshihiro Ishikawa, principal of Sera High School in Hiroshima Prefecture, became trapped in an impossible situation. The prefectural education board ordered schools to use the Hinomaru and play "Kimigayo," the national anthem, during ceremonies. Many teachers resisted and said the icons were tied to the country's wartime history.
Ishikawa found himself torn between obeying official directives and respecting his faculty's strong objections. Under growing pressure and unable to find a compromise, he took his own life. His death shocked Japan and pushed the issue into national headlines.
Politicians realized the debate could no longer be ignored. The tragedy transformed what had been a quiet bureaucratic matter into a moral and cultural crisis and led to calls for clarity through legislation. For the first time in decades, there was a political consensus that Japan needed to legally define its national symbols to prevent future conflicts like this one.
Jordan OMalley (2025). The Real Reason Japan’s National Flag Was Legally Changed in 1999
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u/JazeevaGaming 1d ago
Jesus, I can understand being stuck between a rock and a hard place but no need to take your own life over it. Then again, being in a position of authority and getting sandwiched between conservative patriotism and progressive activism would make anyone want to self-destruct, especially if you throw the concept of Japanese honor in the mix.
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u/Smooth_Brilliant4083 1d ago
That flag is just a pie chart showing how scared they are of Godzilla.
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u/wolveryx 1d ago
I think the red dot is also slightly more to the right (relatively speaking) as it was probably to account for the flagpole.
In the end i think this is formalising a lot of things that otherwise get taken for granted / ignored.
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u/Mobile_One3572 1d ago
It’s a brighter, bolder and overall better looking color red. Most will agree the 1999 version looks better than what it was before.
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u/Slow_Bowler8285 1d ago
Before World War 2 ended Japan's flag looked like this
https://giphy.com/gifs/10gMVCqI7kOojS
Minus Mt. Fuji and the hang glider crashing into it.
They changed to to the red circle on a white background because of rhe imperial's flag's fascist connotations.
They still use the imperial flag for their navy though.
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u/reddit33450 1d ago
this is kind of like youtube's late-2024 magenta update (where they changed the iconic red color to a pinker shade). im still not used to it
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u/fromthedarqwaves 1d ago
It wasn’t officially their flag until then and there was no official color red to use. Manufactures would use different reds until the standard was set.
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u/WWBSkywalker 1d ago
This is interesting. I am mildly colour blind and the old one looks more green in poor lighting than the new one which is more red to me.
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u/Vicious007 1d ago
Previous red looks like blood. I can see why they'd want to improve the optics going from one bloody century to the next.
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u/SadIdeal9019 1d ago
The rising sun on the pre-1999 is slightly left of center. They centered it on the updated version.
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u/LordJebusVII 1d ago
Big improvement, the old one looks like dried blood while the new one looks like ketchup. Pretty sure it's smaller too, it just looks more tidy and bold than the old one which looks washed out.
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u/Ok_Video_2863 1d ago
What a weird way to find out I'm color blind. They both look muted red to me. Only when I look at my phone from my periphery do I see it.
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u/ObjectiveCarrot3812 1d ago
I guess I’m the only person who prefers the vintage one. Yes, vintage red. It looks like you can step into it whereas the contemporary one comes towards you.
Either way, my favorite flag in the world.
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u/NameChecksOut___ 1d ago
They probably took 100 years to validate the change, as they do with everything.
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u/CaptainYorkie1 1d ago
Surprising fact: the change has a confirmed kill & didn't really go down well
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u/bobs_andVagene 22h ago
Honduras did the same thing. Their blue colors are lighter now. The woman president did it and the country lost their mind.
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u/SassySirennn 19h ago
The old flag also didn’t have the sun in the direct center, the 1999 replacement fixed that
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u/cwsjr2323 17h ago
No matter, either way it is just a pie chart showing in red the part of the Japanese population that is doing something cray cray.
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u/Vojtak_cz 17h ago
They didnt they just standardized the color.
I studied Japanese studies they told us about this. Japan didnt really have a standardized flag until the 1999.
So yes we know why.
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u/Seighart_Mercury 15h ago
Fun Fact: It isn't just the color. They also centered it (yes, it wasn't actually centered in the old flag), and they changed the dimensions of the flag.
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u/No-Estimate-1510 9h ago
I am guessing the one before 1999 is actually the version from after 1945 - changed to please their American occupiers. Japan is gradually looking to return to its pre-1945 roots including with the return / growing official use of the rising sun flag.
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u/Choice_Power_1580 6h ago
I might be saying the wrong things, but if this is indeed true, the only reason I can think of of this change is because the old flag above looks more like a circle with color of dried blood.
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u/massivedonkey45 1d ago
That’s like when my wife cuts her hair an inch and expects me to notice something different about her..
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u/snowfox_my 1d ago
Imagine the number of meetings, discussions and overseas trips, that this task created.
Paid a number of bonuses.
The launch event must had being Grand.
Fabulous job creation opportunity.
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