“It’s called a good luck flag — every Japanese soldier carried one into ... Allied soldiers often kept the flags after, per army protocol, they’d searched the bodies of dead combatants ...
A flag carried by a Japanese soldier killed in action during World War II was handed over Thursday by the USS Lexington Museum in Texas to a nonprofit organization for return to the man’s family.
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.