Crossed Flags Emoji

Two crossed Hinomaru, the Japanese national flag, a red sun disc on a white field, mounted on wooden poles and crossed X-style. This is the only "crossed flags" emoji in Unicode, and it's specifically Japanese. It's not a generic crossed-flags symbol; it's a specific cultural marker.

The emoji shows up for anything Japan-related: national holidays, Olympics, cultural festivals, anime and manga references, travel posts about Tokyo or Kyoto, sushi restaurants, J-pop, F1 at Suzuka, and the Japan Day parades held in cities around the world. It's the emoji version of breaking out the Hinomaru decorations.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F38C CROSSED FLAGSU+1F38C CROSSED FLAGS. The emoji was imported from Japanese carrier emoji sets, which is why it's hard-coded as Japanese rather than generic. It ranks about 285th overall and 44th within the flags category, one of the more heavily used flag emojis, thanks to the Japanese domestic market where every carrier already had this icon before 2010.

🎌 has four main usage patterns.

Cultural Japan. Anything tagged "trip to Japan," "Japanese food," "anime convention," or "learning Japanese." The emoji signals "this post is about Japan" without needing 🇯🇵 (which reads more geopolitical). Travel influencers use 🎌 over 🇯🇵 for vibes; news accounts use 🇯🇵 for facts.

National holidays and sports. Emperor's Birthday (Feb 23), Culture Day (Nov 3), Sports Day (second Monday of October), National Foundation Day (Feb 11). Japanese social media floods with 🎌 on these dates. During the Tokyo 2020 Olympics (held in 2021), 🎌 saw a massive search spike.

Anime and manga metadata. K-ON!, Demon Slayer, One Piece, fan accounts stamp 🎌 at the end of bios or post tags as a "this is Japanese media" marker.

Retro video games. Final Fantasy, Mario, Nintendo anniversary posts. The "Hinomaru is Japan" association in gaming culture is particularly strong because Nintendo and Sony are both Japanese, and the emoji acts as a compact badge.

It's also quietly associated with Japan Day parades, the New York Japan Day parade, the London Japan Matsuri, the Paris Japan Expo all use 🎌 as their default social-media symbol. Emojipedia notes that usage is "trending up year over year", unusual for an emoji from 2010.

The physical flag dates to 701 AD, when Emperor Monmu used a sun-disc flag during court ceremonies. The symbolism, red sun, Amaterasu, Imperial lineage, is much older; the word Hinomaru literally means "circle of the sun." Official adoption as a merchant flag came on Proclamation No. 57 of Meiji 3 (February 27, 1870), making it Japan's first codified national flag. It wasn't formally designated the national flag by law until the Act on National Flag and Anthem, August 13, 1999.

The crossed-flags design is a traditional Japanese decoration for national holidays and celebrations. Japanese households, schools, and town halls used to display paired Hinomaru on holidays, crossed at the base, mounted above doorways or in entrances. The practice has faded in modern Japan (except for a few shrines and traditional businesses), but it's preserved in the emoji.

The emoji itself was imported from Japanese carrier emoji. NTT DoCoMo, KDDI au, and SoftBank all had a "crossed Japanese flags" icon in their proprietary emoji sets going back to the late 1990s. When Unicode 6.0 imported the Japanese carrier emoji in 2010, 🎌 came along as U+1F38CU+1F38C, alongside other Japan-specific icons like ⛩️ (Shinto shrine), 🎎 (Japanese dolls), and 🎏 (carp streamer). This is why 🎌 is locked to Japan specifically, unlike truly generic "flags" emojis.

1. 701Emperor Monmu uses a sun-disc flag in court ceremonies, earliest recorded Hinomaru↗
2. 1870Meiji Proclamation No. 57 adopts the sun-disc as the merchant-ship national flag
3. 1999Act on National Flag and Anthem formally designates the Hinomaru as the national flag
4. 2010🎌 approved in Unicode 6.0 as CROSSED FLAGS, imported from Japanese carrier emoji↗
5. 2015Samsung changes 🎌 to show two South Korean flags (Samsung is a Korean company)↗
6. 2016Samsung removes the emoji entirely from its devices during a software update
7. 2017Samsung accidentally reverts to Japanese flags in April 2017 software update↗
8. 2021Tokyo Olympics (held after a pandemic delay), worldwide spike in 🎌 use
9. 2022Samsung One UI 4.0 standardises the Japanese-flags design across all Samsung devices

🎌 is read differently depending on the reader's relationship to Japan.

Japan: Formal, celebratory, a bit old-fashioned. Japanese users tend to reserve 🎌 for actual holidays and big cultural moments, not as a random decorative emoji. Younger Japanese sometimes consider it slightly boomer-coded, the Hinomaru is loaded with postwar political weight in some contexts.

Korea and parts of East Asia: The Hinomaru carries historical baggage from the WWII era and the Japanese occupation. 🎌 sometimes lands more politically in Korean contexts than it does in Japan. Samsung's 2015 switch to Korean flags wasn't random, it reflected a real cultural sensitivity.

Western / global pop culture: Detached from the political reading almost entirely. "Japan = cool" is the dominant association. Used freely in anime fandoms, J-pop fan accounts, travel content, and Nintendo/Sony nostalgia posts.

Samsung users 2015–2017: Briefly saw two South Korean flags. Emojipedia's blog on the reversal walks through the awkward fix. Some older phones still render the Korean version.

Huawei recent devices: 🎌 sometimes renders as two plain white flags, because Huawei's design studio doesn't ship the Hinomaru sun disc. The emoji still works, it just looks wrong.

• •🎌 is the only emoji Unicode hard-codes to a specific country. Every other "flag" emoji is either a regional indicator pair (🇯🇵, 🇧🇷) or a subdivision tag sequence (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿). The crossed flags emoji is permanently Japanese, by fiat.
• •The sun-disc flag is much older than Japan's formal adoption of it, Emperor Monmu used one in 701 AD, but the Hinomaru wasn't legally designated the national flag until 1999. A 1,298-year gap between use and law.
• •Samsung's Korean-flags version of 🎌 briefly turned the emoji into a cross-border PR issue in 2015. Japanese users complained loudly; Samsung eventually reverted but never publicly explained why.
• •The emoji was imported from Japanese carrier emoji sets. NTT DoCoMo, KDDI au, and SoftBank all had a "crossed Japanese flags" icon in their proprietary sets well before 2010. Unicode just ratified what was already standard in Japan.
• •Rank 285 among all emojis, rank 44 among flag emojis. That's relatively high for a country-specific symbol, it beats most regional-indicator flags except the handful of most-searched countries (🇺🇸, 🇯🇵, 🇧🇷, 🇰🇷).
• •On May 5 each year (Children's Day, Kodomo no Hi), Japanese users pair 🎌 with 🎏 (carp streamer). The koinobori fish flags flown from poles on Kodomo no Hi aren't Hinomaru, but the emoji combo communicates the holiday instantly.
• •On Huawei devices, 🎌 sometimes renders as two plain white flags because Huawei's emoji studio doesn't ship the Hinomaru sun disc. The emoji looks broken but it's technically correct, the codepoint is there, just without the red.
• •Apple's design shows the flags on wooden flagpoles with gold tips. Google and Microsoft skip the pole detail. Samsung (since 2022) matches Apple's wooden-pole aesthetic. These are small design decisions but they matter to Japanese users.
• •The Japan Parade in NYC drew a record 60,000 attendees in 2025, up from 50,000 in 2024, with over 2,400 individual marchers across 85 units. The parade's official social promotion uses 🎌 as its primary emoji.
• •On Children's Day (Kodomo no Hi, May 5), the 🎌 you see in captions is almost always standing in for the family's koinobori (carp streamers) flying outside the house. The number of streamers traditionally matches the household: black for the father, red for the mother, blue for each child in descending age.
• •Japan's Tokyo Olympics 2020 (held summer 2021) drove the single biggest spike in 🎌 search interest ever recorded. Naomi Osaka lighting the Olympic cauldron generated millions of 🎌 posts in the following 48 hours.

• •Tokyo Olympics 2020 (held 2021). The crossed flags emoji saw its highest worldwide search volume during the Games.
• •Japan Day NYC. The annual Central Park festival uses 🎌 in all its social promotion. The New York Japan Day is the largest Japanese cultural festival in the US.
• •Persona 5 (2017) and Persona 5 Royal (2020). The Atlus game used Hinomaru iconography heavily, and fan posts use 🎌 as a genre-tag shortcut.
• •Suzuka Circuit F1 Japanese Grand Prix. Japanese F1 fans pair 🎌 with 🏁 at every Suzuka race weekend, "cheering the Hinomaru to the finish."
• •K-ON! and other moe anime. Fan communities use 🎌 as a quick "Japanese media" metadata flag at the end of tweets and bios.
• •Nintendo Direct events. Every Nintendo Direct broadcast prompts a 🎌 flood as fans frame the Kyoto-based company as "the Japan gaming giant."