August 24 in Pen Pal: a flag

[asakiyume]

Writing in her journal on August 24, Kaya recalls that what she and her friends hazily remembered from childhood as banners were in fact flags, raised by an abortive separatist movement.

The colors were black, red, and green. The story doesn't say this, but red is for lava, the blood of the world, and black is for the black earth, and green is for everything that springs from it.

Wakanomori got the scanner working again!



This flag is not much like other Southeast Asian flags, which tend to feature primarily white and red, sometimes with blue. Probably W--'s national flag would be in those colors.

Indonesia


Singapore


Cambodia


Malaysia


Philippines


This doesn't exhaust all the countries in Southeast Asia--there's still Thailand and Laos (whose flags also are red, white, and blue), Vietnam, whose flag is red and yellow, Burma (or Myanmar), which changed in 2010 and now bucks the general color scheme with red, yellow, green, and white, and Brunei and Timor-Leste, which are also both way different.

Where you do get lots of countries with red, black, and green flags is in Africa.

Flags featuring horizontal stripes in those colors include Malawi...



Kenya



and South Sudan, among others



Flags. Fun to look at; supercharged with meaning.

Trivia question. There is a big flag in our basement, a tiny flag in my study, and a big flag upstairs. Care to guess what they are? To forestall an obvious guess, none are the Japanese flag.

Comments

Trivia guess!

[aliseadae]

Timor-Leste! And, uh, two others. Dunno what the other two would be.

Re: Trivia guess!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

YES!

You guessed the one in my study.

We'll leave it to others to guess the other two :-)

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I love flags. As a child, I used to copy them out of the World Book Encyclopedia and reproduce them on paper and/or cloth. Some are so elegant.

Hmm, just as a guess, I'd suppose one of your flags is from Timor-Leste.

Are your other flags national flags? Or do you have any state flags as well?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You are right about the Timor-Leste flag! And the other two... one is national and one is quasi-national.

[sovay]

The story doesn't say this, but red is for lava, the blood of the world, and black is for the black earth, and green is for everything that springs from it.

I like that.

There is a big flag in our basement, a tiny flag in my study, and a big flag upstairs. Care to guess what they are?

The only one I'm sure about is Timor-Leste. Is there one for wakanomori—wherever he was born or is important to him?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes, re: Wakanomori :-)

[sovay]

Yes, re: Wakanomori

Gah. All I can remember is that he grew up in Dorset, because he told me some place-names once that I had to look up. English flag with St. George's cross, just to be different from the Union Jack?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Alas nothing so creative. The flag in the basement--quite a large one--is the one you dismiss :-)

PS

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

the separatists' flag is better now--Waka fixed the scanner.

[yamamanama.livejournal.com]

That's a cool flag. It reminds me of Thailand's, with a different color scheme.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

And look at it *now*--Wakanomori fixed the scanner.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I love the history of flags! These are all cool ones.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

When we lived in Japan, we got a book of all the national flags of the world (at that time). It was brand-new and up-to-date with the Russian Federation!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

I once got a question in a trivia contest where we had to correctly identify the flags of Singapore, Indonesia, Poland and Austria. Red-and-white seems to be a popular choice...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Clearly they were trying to trip you up!

There's this comic Polandball that the Tall One likes to read (whose quality is all over the place since it's random submissions from anyone who feels like submitting, he tells me), in which the actors are various nation-states, represented as national flags, but drawn as circles. Apparently they go and complicate things by often depicting Poland upside down (as a put-down, indicating that Poland is incompetent)--so for the longest time the Tall One was scratching his head and wondering why they kept on representing Indonesia in European geopolitical situations.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

hehe. Polandball reminds me of something frigg has shared with me about stereotypes concerning different nations, but mostly featuring Scandivian characters as the central roles. It's pretty funny. Let me see if I can find it...

Yep, here it is: http://satwcomic.com/

Edited to fix html

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Oh this is fabulous! (Much nicer than Polandball.)

I'm going to follow this on Tumblr.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

I've always enjoyed looking at flags and have good intentions of memorizing them. Alas.... :P

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Oh me either--I had to keep checking to be sure who was who in the Scandinavian ones :-)

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

LOL. Glad to know I'm not the only one. :P

[aliseadae]

Is your other flag Scotland? Wales?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The other flag is for a not-yet nation in the Middle East . . .

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

(Oh, oops, which is giving the game away on the last flag, but I'm assuming you saw upthread that the second flag was the Union Jack)

[doubt72.livejournal.com]

Coming late (I never keep up with anything, I guess), but the flag of the Philippines is (as far as I know) unique, in that it changes if the Philippines is in a state of war: the color of the stripes flips (i.e., it changes to the upside-down version). This also applies to when the flag is displayed vertically (i.e., hung down).

This has actually resulted in minor international incidents at bilateral events (though nothing as silly as the state of Texas flying the Chilean flag over the statehouse mistakenly).

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's *very* cool--I didn't know that about the Philippines at all. I hope I have the nation-at-peace flag here!

That is *hilarious* about the Chile/Texas flags. I just looked at them both, and I can see how it could happen? IF IT WASN'T AT THE STATEHOUSE. DUH! GUYS! KNOW YOUR FLAG.