Japanese good-luck flags from World War II, and the quest to find their eternal resting place: One local family journeyed overseas to reunite one of the flags with its home country.
Hiroko and Hidehiko Nogi of Atascadero went on a voyage with value.
“It feels like our mission was complete," said Hiroko. "Yes, we did it."
Earlier this year, the couple traveled to Tokyo, Japan to visit family, but it wasn’t just a family vacation; they felt they had a calling.
“This flag has meaning," said Hiroko. "Everybody prays for their loved ones to come back from the battlefield."
The couple found and received a Japanese good-luck flag from World War II in a Cayucos antique shop years ago, and thought this was the time to find its rightful owner.
“Then we believe the soldier’s spirit can go and rest in peace,” said Hiroko.
But after over 80 years of the flag’s existence and thousands of families in Japan with the same surname as the Japanese soldier on their flag:
“No hometown name or no symbol, anything,” said Hiroko of the flag.
There just wasn’t enough specific information on the flag to know whose it was, and without it, the Nogi family decided to give the flag to the Yasukuni Shrine in Hidehiko’s hometown of Tokyo.
“The shrine is a symbol for the soldiers. They promised each other, ‘If we die on the battlefield, let’s meet at the shrine,’” said Hiroko.
After seeing a story KSBY put together in February about the journey the Nogi family was about to embark on, Terry Packer from Arroyo Grande contacted the Nogis.
“This flag came to me from my father-in-law,” said Packer.
It was yet another Japanese good-luck flag that his father-in-law, George Johnson, who served in the South Pacific during WWII and just celebrated his 99th birthday last week in Wisconsin, had acquired in the late 1940s after the war but didn’t know what it said, or what to do with it.
Convening at Nogi Sushi, the couple’s sushi restaurant on Traffic Way in Atascadero, Packer and his wife, Janis, listened and learned what the Nogis could decipher from his father-in-law’s Japanese relic.
“It’s been open-ended this entire time,” said Packer. “I think that there is closure coming for the flag, and I know there will be closure on George’s part knowing what it definitively says and all that it represents. It’s wonderful.”
As for what’s next for Johnson’s flag:
“George has a lead that he wants to follow up himself, and I think between all of us pitching in," said Packer. "I think the closure is going to feel pretty darn good."
WATCH: How the Nogis found a Japanese 'good luck' flag at a local antique shop
