Yet another good luck flag

[grunkfrog]

Hi everyone, I know you get a lot of these flags but I'm not sure where best to turn to find out something about it. I know about obon but I'm not giving anything up until I can ascertain the authenticity, and they will just add it to their queue of something like 500 flags and I might never learn anything about it. I love history and I want to learn about this flag. I've posted to reddit translations as well, but I think this community seems more appropriate as I'm hoping for some location information related to the shrine/temple stamp.

Anything you can provide is great, but I'm most interested in what I assume is a red shrine stamp in the corner. Locating that shrine/temple would give me the best chance of learning the history of the flag, I think.

The flag is from my grandfather who passed away before I was born, and he didn't tell my mother anything about his time in the war, so I can't go to the source. All I have to go on is the flag itself.

Thanks for your help!

 

[mdchachi]

I'm betting this one's fake. It all looks like it was entirely written by one hand and many characters appear to be gibberish to me. Let's see what the experts say.

 

[Majestic]

Looks very fake to me. There are legitimate kanji characters on it, but many are illegible, and most feel like fake idioms, or maybe Chinese idioms (that are not used in Japanese). No recipient's name, no signatures, just seemingly random 4-character idioms, most of which are unintelligible. Actually it looks very much like the flag that was posted on here several days ago, with a near identical 4-character idiom of 生保向？

The red seal doesn't look like a temple/shrine seal. Not a typical Japanese seal, anyway.

Often guys who went to the war wanted Japanese-ish flags as souvenirs, so there was a huge cottage industry in pumping out fake wartime flags. Could be that your grandfather bought one of those souvenir flags.

 

[grunkfrog]

Thanks for the insight! My wife reads some Chinese and she said she recognized some characters but that's all, although we thought maybe Japanese used Chinese characters for writing in 'the old days' as they did in Korea, but if it reads as nonsense then it's probably a fake. Ah well, would still be interesting to learn where it came from but certainly almost impossible if the writing has no actual connection to real people or places.

Cheers!

 

[AustinNor]

Let me know if you found someone that was able to translate as I'm trying to do the same thing with this from my grandfather.

 

[AustinNor]