[War & Business] The Rising Sun Flag and Militarism

The image of the Japanese flag hanging in front of the Japan team’s accommodation at the Tokyo Olympic Village on the 18th. Tokyo, Japan - Photo by Reuters and Yonhap News Agency

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyunwoo Lee] The controversy over the Rising Sun Flag, which has become one of the stumbling blocks in Korea-Japan historical issues, has actually been ongoing within Japan for a long time. In Japan, the national flag, the Hinomaru, which is the prototype of the Rising Sun Flag, has also been a subject of controversy. The core of the controversy is that the Hinomaru does not represent Japan’s history and culture and its meaning as a national flag is ambiguous.

Even within the Japanese historical academic community, it is rare to find discussions linking the Hinomaru and the Rising Sun Flag to Japan’s traditional culture or historical authenticity. The Hinomaru, which became the prototype of the Rising Sun Flag, started in the 1870s during the opening of Japan when Japanese delegations sent overseas flew it on their ships to distinguish nationality, and it is known to have had no militaristic or nationalist meaning.

Originally, the Hinomaru was called “Hinomaru,” meaning “round sun” in Japanese, and even before the opening of the country, it was a flag certifying trading ships authorized by the shogunate for foreign trade. In the 17th century Edo Shogunate, for administrative convenience and financial reasons, a certificate-like Hinomaru was issued on cheap white cloth with the cheapest red dye painted in a circle, which became the national flag.

In effect, a trade certification became the national flag, and Japan was forced to use the Hinomaru as its national flag under pressure from Western powers at the time. Foreign envoys who often saw the Hinomaru at Nagasaki Port, Japan’s only foreign trade port during the Edo Shogunate, insisted that since it was a well-known symbol of Japanese ships from old times, it should be used as the national flag, and thus it became so. This was a bitter experience of a small country just beginning to open up.

The Rising Sun Flag was created to wash away this humiliation of a small country. The Japanese imperial government mobilized government-affiliated scholars to forcibly insert the traditional sunburst pattern, used in furniture and paintings, to make the flag appear historically significant. They even made the unfounded claim that the Japanese imperial family had used a similar flag for over 1,000 years and used it as a military flag, but it was never officially adopted as the national flag.

Within Japan, criticism that the national flag was created through hasty administration continued, and until 1999, the Hinomaru was used as a de facto national flag without official status. The reason it was finally adopted in 1999 was mainly because it had been used as the national flag for over 100 years, making it too late to change it.

The recent sensitivity of the Japanese government and some far-right groups regarding the Rising Sun Flag controversy surrounding the Tokyo Olympics also hides this background. For Japanese right-wingers, the militaristic flag that recalls the glory of Imperial Japan actually contains the history of Japan’s defeat in World War II, marked by the humiliation of a small country in the early modern period and distorted militarism.