Last modified: 2000-01-07 by phil nelson
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I saw a poster for a Japanese movie that seems to contain a fictitious flag. The film is called, in English, "Goodbye Japan" (the Japanese title, written all in hiragana, appears to be "Sayonara Jippon," with the second word apparently being a phonetic transcription of the English word "Japan", in place of the Japanese Kanji normally used for the name of the country).
The film seems to be about a man who moves to a small Japanese island, southwest of Okinawa, near Taiwan, and becomes the ruler of his own tiny country.
The poster shows a map with a flag flying over the little island.
The flag (drawn in outline only, so no colors are shown) contains an eight-pointed sun that looks very much like the Chinese Nationalist (Taiwan) sun, and a crescent moon underneath it (points pointing upward). I have no idea whether the "sun" device has anything to do with the island's proximity to Taiwan, or whether the "crescent" has any Muslim connection, or whether the flag is even explained in the film.
Bruce Tindall, 19 February 1996
Last night I saw the Japanese movie "Farewell, Japan," about which I had posted briefly a few days ago.
In the movie, a small island in the Ryukyus, called Akaoneko, declares its independence from Japan.
The new country's flag is red, with a gold sun and crescent moon device in the center. The sun is similar to the sun on the Taiwan flag; the points of the moon point upwards. The sun-moon device also appears on some cars and buildings and police uniforms, sometimes in gold, sometimes in green.
The flags are of various shapes -- one is a rectangle approximately 2:3, one approx. 1:2, one an isosceles triangle, one a right triangle (the bottom edge is perpendicular to the hoist), and one an irregular shape reminiscent of that of Nepal, especially considering that it's emblazoned with a sun and a moon.
But it's not surprising that the flag wasn't standardized; the island only has a few hundred inhabitants, and they had only just declared independence and hadn't had time to enlist the help of the experts from the FLAGS list to design a proper flag!
I don't have a very good map of Japan, but I could not find an island named Akaoneko, and I assume the island is fictitious. In the film, it's supposed to be in the Okinawa prefecture.
Although the film is a comedy, it apparently has some basis in fact. A professor of Japanese from a local university gave a little talk before the film; he said that the Ryukyus (which are closer to Taiwan than any other Japanese islands) had been part of Japan for a relatively short time, formerly spoke a different language, and still feel like a "different" people. The people there, he said, often feel neglected by the central government and resent being treated as second-class citizens. (In the film, the proximate cause of the island's secession was that they didn't get help quickly after a damaging typhoon.)
Bruce Tindall, 7 February 1996
The programme, an Australian soap-drama set in and around the Australian embassy of a small fictional country in South-East Asia (presumably somewhere near Thailand or Malaysia). The country, I think, was called Ragaan, and the programme is simply called "Embassy".
The fictional flag, the national flag of the Asian country, is white, with three thin horizontal green stripes (thus comparable to the old South Vietnamese flag), with a green crescent (possibly with star) in the upper hoist corner.
A fairly realistic flag for a country in that part of the world, IMHO.
James Dignan, 09 February 1996
Back in the 70s there was a very interesting UK/Canada co-production called "Power Play", about the planning and execution of a military coup in a fictional and un-named possibly European country (it was filmed in Yugoslavia IIRC). It was inspired by Edawrk Luttwak's "Coup D'Etat: A Practical Handbook".
Anyway, in the film the country used a vertical tricolour of blue,
yellow and green. It was used very consistently throughout, with it
appearing on all the military vehicles - and the designers also worked
out an air force roundel (concentric green-yellow-blue) and
Presidential Standard (the flag with a coat of arms on the yellow
stripe).
Roy Stilling, 10 February 1996
The film version of Frederick Forsyth's "The Dogs of War" had a flag for the fictional Republic of Zangaro in Africa. Black with some kind of red rising sun emblem. Sorry I cannot be more specific. It was a long time since I saw the film and IIRC it was a rotten adaptation anyway.
Stuart Notholt, 11 February 1996
The West-African country of Zangaro had a flag with a yellow star with 10 points in the centre and from the centre red and black stripe emerge, like in the Dutch naval jack.
Jeroen Heijmans, 19 April 1999
Of movies in which flags figure not only symbolically, but in great numbers as well, one may mention a film about Genghis Khan (starring Omar Sharif, I think) which made use of the Mongol form of vexilloids quite a bit.
Alexander Justice, 24 November 1995
According my daugther, the flag of the prince of Cinderella in the Walt Disney movie, is red over blue triangular.
Jaume Ollé 6 April 1999
I saw (again) the old Speelberg's movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Throughout the film there are three flags hoisted prominently in several places, including the spot where the extraterestrials are landing - US flag (the spot is somewhewre in
Wyoming, IIRC), French flag (the leader of the scientific team is French) and in between the two a white flag with a whide triangle in
the middle. This is supposedly the flag of the sci-team, but it is never seen very well to se details in the triangle (maybe a white
globe and some inscription).
Zeljko Heimer, 6 April 1999
The flag of Sarkhan from the movie "The Ugly American," was a triangle tricolor flag. It was yellow on the top, orange on the bottom, and had a white triangle, with what appears to be the symbol of an overhead shot of a five-headed dragon on fire.
Daniel Timothy Dey, 9 April 1999
Puzzled by the topic? If so, you haven't seen this movie, a western filled with anachronisms and stuff that seems to have come out of a Jules Verne book, or a Michelangelo drawing pad.
The plot basically evolves around an evil inventor, Dr. Loveless, defeated in the american civil war that, by means of a secret weapon, kidnaps the president of the US. The aim was to destroy the US, giving a piece of it to several countries (UK, Spain and Mexico) and keeping another piece for himself. This piece was called Loveless Territory and has a flag very well seen in a couple of scenes in the movie: Based in the Confederate warflag, it's a St. Andrew's cross, black on a grey field, with a large white disc centered, charged with the black outline of a spider. The arms where charged by 3 white stars each (probably the visible portion of the whole thing, behind the disc).
A very uncoloured flag. But interesting, nevertheless. The grey field was of the same colour of the uniform of the soldiers that fight for him (old confederate soldiers), the spider has an obvious explanation for those that saw the movie (I'm not saying what is, so that those of you that didn't see it yet and wish to may enjoy it to the max) and the rest is very "confed"...
Jorge Candeias, 23 August 1999
I saw a couple of flags on TV that I hope someone can identify for me.
The first was in a shot taken at the 1936 Olympics. The flag, which was flying among the national flags around the stadium, was a Union Jack defaced by a white circle in the middle in which there seemed to be a castle with two or three turrets.
The second flag (actually, I guess it's a banner) was in the Mel Brooks remake of "To Be Or Not To Be." It was a rectangular banner, hanging on an office wall. At the top (in chief?) was the Nazi flag (a horizontal red bar with the white circle and black swastika). The rest of the banner was a vertical black-white-red tricolor. A real banner or just a movie prop?
Phil Cleary, 24 November 1999
The instances of a castle in British state heraldry I can think of are in the Irish Royal Crest, "A castle triple-towered [?], from the portal a hart springing Argent, attired and hooved Or". The City of Gibraltar's arms have a red castle on white, a gold key on red in base.
Andrew Yong, 25 November 1999