By Wayne Ko 

Special thanks to Wayne for these beutiful flags. 
Please visit Wayne's website for some fantastic ideas - 
Origami Wargame Miniatures? 
You - bet - check them out - incredible!

The following are the flags I use for my samurai miniatures.  They should be compatible with most metal figures in the 25 mm range; if not they should be easily altered using any graphics program to fit your requirements.  The flags are based on those found from several of Stephen Turnbull's excellent books on the samurai.  They are presented free of charge as a thank you to the rec.games.miniatures.historical NG community  (also thanks to the origami community, although this may be of  less use for its members) who have been extremely helpful in sharing their knowledge and expertise.  Also, there are few internet resources available for samurai heraldry and this will hopefully shed a little
light on the subject.  Besides, after spending countless hours making the flags, it seems like a waste not to save someone else from going through the tedious process of drawing them with a computer program.  If you do find the flags helpful, all I ask is that you help someone else with an act of kindness as others have done for me during my research and to support quality authors such as Stephen Turnbull by buying their books.

Printing the flags:

The flags can be saved as a single page of graphics by right-clicking on the image and saving to a directory on your computer/disk.  Please note that the flag images should be printed at a setting of 300 dpi in order for them to be the correct size for 25 mm miniatures; this is the default printer resolution for most printers.  You may need a graphics program that allows you to adjust the print resolution.  To keep the  image size manageable, I've only given one side of the flag, you will need to do make a mirror image to get the back of the flag.  Also note that
the flag poles should be on the left  and top of the image I've provided.  As far as I could tell from my sources, the reverse of the flags are backwards - i.e. all the Japanese characters will appear backwards just as if they were written on a window!  A few of the characters or colours may seem out of proportion in the images, but once you actually print, the bleeding from the darker colours will make things look right.  I use plain paper for printing and the results are quite good and, therefore,  I do not think the expensive papers are necessary. As a final note, these are the standards of the generals and may not necessarily be the sashimonos wore on the backs of the samurai, although they may be. However, since information on sashimonos is so sketchy, I think it is safe to use them as sashimonos for wargame figures.