Millions of Japanese soldiers carried the flags, known as yosegaki hinomaru or ... of war — a practice they pointed out is probably as old as war itself — or on the families who kept them.

World War II veteran Marvin Strombo traveled 10,000 miles from his quiet home in Montana to the land of the rising sun to personally return a Japanese flag he had taken from Sadao Yasue during the ...

who was drafted by Japan's Imperial Army in 1943 and killed in action. For him, his father was a bespectacled man in an old family photo standing by a signed good-luck flag that he carried to war.