TOKYO 2020 was supposed to be held on, well, as the name says, 2020. The pandemic, of course, meant that plans had to be changed.
But before the arrival of COVID-19, Olympic fever was already running high in Japan. In 2019, a group of Japanese artists, caught up in a sportive fever, wanted to portray all the competing countries in an unmistakably homegrown style: as anime samurai.
And so the World-flags.org website was born, with the goal of creating a samurai based on the flags of each of the 200 countries competing in the world games.
Now that the Olympics are in full swing, the spotlight has once again swiveled back to this artsy initiative, created by 15 Japanese volunteers. Images of each country’s samurai have become viral over the weekend.
So far, 84 of the 200 countries now have samurai versions, which can be viewed in the World Flags website and Twitter account.
"Samurai are unique to Japan and we want everyone to get to know traditional Japanese culture," creator Kamaya Yamamoto told the BBC in a July 23 interview.
But in addition, said Kozo Yamada, another artist working on this volunteer project, "We hope this can be a way for people to learn about other countries.”
Flag-inspired samurai make Olympics news
The illustrated samurai get design inspiration from the countries’ flags, or symbols often associated with them.
The Irish samurai, for example, gets a shamrock pin and a banded green kimono. Mexico’s samurai, meanwhile, is accompanied by an eagle — the national bird of the Latin American country.
In June 2019 (more than two years ago), the collective posted an illustration of a samurai named “Risaaru” (Rizal) — a warrior armed with a musket, and covered in red, white, and blue armor. A sun crest is emblazoned on his central thigh guard.
“A samurai who summons the sun!” said the accompanying caption in Japanese.
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