Technology 5

I forget why it even came up, but my mom was saying this morning how she wished she still knew someone who knew flag signals like this but in Japanese, obviously. I guess she learned it once when she was little. Now I assumed that, as that link may have shown you, this kind of flag signaling probably had some kind of military origin, so I asked if she knew what it used to be used for.

"Well," she said, "this was before there were cell phones..."

I think of all the youth in Japan currently spending every waking minute texting from their cell phones and then try to imagine what life must have been like when my mom was young. I guess, you never left home without two handkerchieves.