Japan Gay Flag
Regional Pride Flag ·
Six rainbow stripes with the flag of Japan laid over the upper hoist quarter entire, white ground and red disc together. One of the national designs Greg Gomes marked as his own. [1]
Key facts
- Designer
- Greg Gomes
- Created
- Published online
- Published online by 2002
- Aspect Ratio
- 2:3 · apparent
- Ratio Notes
- Measured from the recovered artwork, 384 by 256 pixels and 3,007 bytes, the size the page lists. Published as apparent: measured from a served thumbnail, not from a specification.
- Represented Identity
- LGBTQ
Status Variant
Archive categories Regional and Language-Specific Pride Flags
Overview
Six rainbow stripes fill the field and the flag of Japan is laid over the upper hoist quarter entire, its white ground carrying the red disc at the centre of that quarter. Red, orange and yellow therefore appear only on the fly side of the upper half. Greg Gomes published it on the national page and marked it as his own design; the file held here matches the byte count his page lists. [1] No physical use has been documented.
Identity & Context
- Represented Identity
- LGBTQ
- National Context
- Japan
Creators
The Creator
Greg Gomes
Designer and publisher
Greg Gomes is credited as the designer of the flags marked on his own pages, and as the publisher of the two sites that carried them. He ran Gay Journey at gayjourney.com, whose footer carries a copyright range beginning in 2002, and the later Gay Flags of the World at gayflags.biz, 2005 to 2011. Both published from American Dimensions, PO Box 573, McKinney, Texas 75070, and both ran the same four series of gay flags: general, national, United States state, and Canadian provincial. A post-office box is a mailing address. It does not establish where Gomes lived, and no source states where any of these files was drawn.
He marked his own designs with a symbol before the flag name, which is what separates the flags he made from the flags he catalogued. The marking is per flag and not every flag carries it: of the forty-seven on the national page, Azerbaijan, Canada and the United States do not. [1] His terms for reuse were set out on the same page, in his own words: the marked designs were his and Gay Journey’s property and protected by copyright; anyone wishing to use one was to contact him and say where it would be used, credit the design to him, and make the flag a clickable link back to gay_flags.htm. He also stated that the marked designs were not for sale through the page. [1]
Outside his own sites the collection was noticed twice on Flags of the World. Francisco Santos wrote on 14 May 2003 that GayJourney.COM carried “lots of rainbows: from Argentina to Wales, EU, UNO, US states, Canadian provinces and general gay flags,” and added that “perhaps not all of these flags are actually used in the real word.” Richard Knipel wrote on 14 June 2004 that most of the flags, “with ‘GJ’ underneath, were designed by the site’s author, Greg Gomes,” and that it was “hard to say how many of these are flying somewhere.” [2] Tomislav Todorović, reading the state series in 2015, recorded that the Wyoming flag was “not marked as his creation,” unlike most images.
One property of the collection recurs across the individual flags and is recorded here rather than on each of them: of the twenty-nine files recovered from the two sites, fifteen share one identical set of six sampled rainbow values, across both the Canadian and the national series. The rainbow arrives in these designs as a fixed component of the collection rather than as a choice made for each flag.
The thirty-one entries held here are not his complete output. Gay Journey and Gay Flags of the World carried further national, United States state, Canadian and general designs for which no artwork has been recovered, and the archive builds entries only for flags it can see. No biographical source about Gomes has been located beyond the two sites and the Texas post-office box, and no photograph of him has been found.
Attribution
- Organization
- Gay Journey
Attribution notes
This flag is one of the designs on the national page, and it carries the symbol Gomes placed before a flag name to mark a design as his own rather than one he catalogued. [1] His publication, that marking convention and his reuse terms are set out in the creator record below.
Origin
- Digital Origin
- Gay Journey (gayjourney.com)
- Origin Type
- creation place unknown; published online
- Physical Origin Status
- Not documented.
Represents Japan. The design was not made there: it was published through a McKinney, Texas post-office address and the place it was drawn is not documented. [1]
The flag represents Japan. Where it was made is not documented. The design was published through Gay Journey (gayjourney.com), run from American Dimensions, PO Box 573, McKinney, Texas, which is a mailing address for the publisher and not evidence of where Gomes lived or worked. No source located places Gomes in Japan or identifies him as a resident or community member there. [1]
Dates & Chronology
- Year Created
- Published online
- Published online by 2002; the collection ran to 2011. No physical use documented.
- Creation Bounds
- Four different things are recorded here and they are not the same date. The copyright range on Gay Journey begins in 2002, and the site's flag section is in the Internet Archive from 28 October 2002, which bounds the collection rather than this design. [1] Collection-level publication is documented from outside the sites twice: Francisco Santos described GayJourney.COM on Flags of the World on 14 May 2003 as carrying "lots of rainbows: from Argentina to Wales, EU, UNO, US states, Canadian provinces and general gay flags," and Richard Knipel wrote again on 14 June 2004. Neither report lists or dates an individual flag. [2] Direct documentation of this individual design has not been dated. No source dates the design itself, and no flag in the collection carries a date of its own. The year given is the earliest year the collection is documented in publication.
Lineage
- Direct predecessors
- Rainbow Pride Flag
- Sibling flags
- Alberta Gay Flag, Straight Ally Pride Flag, Anarcha-Queer Flag (rainbow variant), Argentina Gay Flag, Australia Gay Flag, Brazil Gay Flag
+ 44 more
British Columbia Gay Flag, Canadian Pride Flag, Chicago Pride Flag (Rainbow Stripes, Purple Stars), Chile Gay Flag, Dominican Republic Gay Flag, Egypt Gay Flag, European Union Gay Flag, France Gay Flag, Gay Pride Flag of Pakistan, Heteroflexible Pride Flag, Heterosexual / Straight Pride Flag, Homoflexible Pride Flag, India Gay Flag, Italy Gay Flag, Jewish Gay Pride Flag, Manitoba Gay Flag, Mexico Gay Flag, Netherlands Gay Flag, New Brunswick Gay Flag, Newfoundland Gay Flag, Northwest Territories Gay Flag, Nova Scotia Gay Flag, Nunavut Gay Flag, Ontario Gay Flag, Palestinian Gay Pride Flag, Panama Gay Flag, Philadelphia Pride Flag, Prince Edward Island Gay Flag, Quebec Gay Flag, Rainbow Flag with White Triangle (Sapporo), Rainbow Israel Flag, Rainbow Polish Flag (2014, Angela Getler), Russia Gay Flag, Saskatchewan Gay Flag, Social Justice Pride Flag, South African Gay Pride Flag, Switzerland Gay Flag, Tanzania Gay Flag, Texas Rainbow Flag, Turkish Gay Pride Flag, Two-Spirit Pride Flag (2005, Zoccole), Two-Spirit Pride Flag (2016 Tumblr documentation), Victory Over AIDS Flag (1980s, designer unknown), Yukon Territory Gay Flag - Lineage confidence
- high
Two visual sources, one of which the lineage graph can hold and one of which it cannot. The six-stripe Rainbow Pride Flag is a direct Pride-flag parent and is registered as one. The Flag of Japan is the second visual source, and it is recorded as a structured source-flag relationship in Design rather than as a graph node, because the graph accepts only Encycloflaggia entries and no Pride entry should be invented to create one. The relationship here is: source flag retained entire and set as a canton. Flags of the World describes the method this whole class of flag follows as "taking an existing flag and 'merging' it with the Rainbow Flag or various GLBT symbols to represent GLBT members of the group the existing flag represents." [2] The other Gomes flags are siblings by collection rather than by descent: one designer, one operation, four series published together under one set of terms. A shared designer is a collection relationship and not a substitute for parentage.
Lineage tree
Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 4 records across 4 generations.
- Ancestors -3
- Original Rainbow Flag (1978)
- Ancestors -2
- Seven-Stripe Rainbow Flag (1978)
- Ancestor
- Rainbow Pride Flag
- This record
- Japan Gay Flag
Colors & Symbolism
No published statement of meaning has been located.
| Colour | Hex |
|---|---|
| Red | #FF0000 |
| Orange | #FF6300 |
| Yellow | #FFFF00 |
| Green | #319C00 |
| Blue | #0000CE |
| Violet | #CE31FF |
This flag has no official digital palette. Color values shown are approximate.
The page gives the flags names and nothing more. [1]
Placement: the six stripes fill the field behind the canton. The canton is white with a red disc and takes no value from the sequence. These are working values sampled from the surviving artwork at the centre of each band, not published specifications; the collection-level note on the recurring Gomes rainbow values is carried in the creator record rather than repeated on each flag.
Design
- Aspect Ratio
- 2:3 · apparent
- Ratio Notes
- Measured from the recovered artwork, 384 by 256 pixels and 3,007 bytes, the size the page lists. Published as apparent: measured from a served thumbnail, not from a specification.
- Orientation
- horizontal
- Center Symbol
- Red disc of the flag of Japan
Not described in any located source. The recovered artwork is 384 by 256 pixels. The page lists the file at 3,007 bytes, which the recovered copy matches exactly, identifying it as the file the page served. A description drawn from the artwork itself has not yet been written. [1] The design is described from the recovered artwork, not from any source that describes it.
No proportion, construction sheet or specification has been located. [1]
Six horizontal rainbow stripes fill the field, red at the top through orange, yellow, green and blue to violet. The flag of Japan is laid over the upper hoist quarter as a canton, its white field carrying the red disc at the centre of that quarter. The red, orange and yellow stripes therefore appear only on the fly side of the upper half, while green, blue and violet run the full width below.
Source flag and visual comparison
- Source flag
- Flag of Japan
- Jurisdiction
- Japan
- Relationship
- source flag retained entire and set as a canton
- Elements retained
- the whole national flag, white ground and centred red disc, unaltered
- Elements altered
- nothing within the national flag; it is reduced to a quarter of the field and the remainder becomes six rainbow stripes
The flag of Japan is a red disc on white; the Commons file used for comparison follows the Law Concerning the National Flag and Anthem of 1999. Gomes did not recolour it at all, which makes this the least altered of the national designs.
Usage & Adoption
- Current Status
- unknown
No physical use has been documented. [1]
Image Archive
Source Flag and Visual Comparison
Footnotes & Citations
Sources and footnotes 3 sources
Designer page
- 1. National Gay Flags Of The World. Greg Gomes. Gay Journey / American Dimensions, McKinney, Texas. Accessed 2026-08-10 · Archived version
The designer's own page. Cited for the flag's publication, its marking as a Gomes design, and the reuse terms.
Databases
- 2. Variations of the Gay Pride Rainbow Flag (1). randy young (editor); reports by Richard Knipel and Francisco Santos. Flags of the World (2023-09-30). Accessed 2026-08-10
Cited for the two dated outside reports of the GayJourney collection, 14 May 2003 and 14 June 2004.
Image file page
- File:Flag of Japan.svg. Wikimedia Commons contributors, to the Law Concerning the National Flag and Anthem (1999). Wikimedia Commons. Accessed 2026-08-11
The file-description page for the source-flag comparison image in this entry's gallery, read for its licence, authorship and restriction metadata.
Image Sources
- Rendering
- original artwork recovered
- Japan gay flag as published by Greg Gomes on the Gay Journey national page. · Credit: Design by Greg Gomes, Gay Journey · Gay Journey, National Gay Flags Of The WorldRights Gay Journey identified the marked designs as Gomes's property and asked that reuse be credited to him and linked back to gay_flags.htm. The credit and the link here are placed to those terms as published; the present rights and contact status have not been independently verified. [1]
- Flag of Japan (Japan), the source flag for this design. The flag of Japan is a red disc on white; the Commons file used for comparison follows the Law Concerning the National Flag and Anthem of 1999. Gomes did not recolour it at all, which makes this the least altered of the national designs. Relationship: source flag retained entire and set as a canton. Retained: the whole national flag, white ground and centred red disc, unaltered. Altered: nothing within the national flag; it is reduced to a quarter of the field and the remainder becomes six rainbow stripes. · Credit: Wikimedia Commons contributors, to the Law Concerning the National Flag and Anthem (1999) · Wikimedia CommonsRights Public domain. Wikimedia Commons marks this file with an insignia restriction: it depicts a flag, coat of arms, seal or other official insignia whose use is restricted in many countries independently of copyright. Reproduced here as a comparison for the Gomes design, not as a representation of any government.