By In Subasci, Shirasu records herself talking to two girls before the video cuts off abruptly. Earlier, news agencies report on the successful signing of the peace accords during the Kufura Jayanti festival. Akagi gets video of journalists celebrating at the bar. It takes Akagi a week after the flag recovery to finally meet up with Shirasu, and he meets with her at an outdoor cafe. Five days after the flag recovery, Shirasu was told by the UN that she’d no longer be embedding with the SDC. An official gave her a bag with all her belongings from the base and said that they’d be keeping all her photos and videos because it might contain material that’s inconvenient to the UN. He expected the material would be returned to her once the UN was done redacting it. He then handed her an envelope that Eversalt wanted delivered to her. Shirasu asked if she’d ever see the people of the SDC again, and the official told her no. Shirasu ended up back at the hotel where she was originally staying and wondered what the point was of the last month if she was back at square one. She opened the envelope from Eversalt and was surprised to see her good luck charm doll and a note. The note mentioned that the doll had become frayed and Shirasu saw that a memory card had been stuffed into the doll. She loaded the memory card into her laptop and found a video from Eversalt saying that this memory card had a copy of everything Shirasu shot before her cameras were confiscated. Eversalt said that Shirasu had risked her life to get these photos and videos, so no one had any right to take it from her. The entire SDC team gathered for a group shot to tell Shirasu to take care of herself and keep taking pictures. Shirasu began crying at her laptop after watching the video. Shirasu started typing out her thoughts and wrote that she’d never forget the people of the SDC. At the cafe, Shirasu tells Akagi that she’s going to stay in Subasci for a bit because there’s still lots of photos she wants to take. He warns her to be cautious because insurgent attacks are still occurring. Shirasu and Akagi take photos around the city. Later, Shirasu talks on the phone with her brother Takashi, who asks when she’s coming home. He reminds her that their father’s birthday is in two days.
With the conflict in Uddiyana winding down, freelance journalists pack up to go report on other battlefields. Naraya joins Akagi in the bar and asks Akagi what’s next for him. Akagi isn’t sure, but given all the unanswered questions about recent events, he plans on staying. Naraya leaves as the former Kufura enters the bar to speak with Akagi. They head back to her favorite hill and she thanks Akagi for his efforts to help her country. He takes videos of the landscapes and spots an explosion in the distance at the airport. He returns to the bar and smashes his camera in anger over what he’s learned. Shirasu recorded a video for Akagi ahead of her departure and left it for him at his hotel. She mentioned that she was fascinated with one particular photo of Akagi’s at his exhibit and that it had stayed with her ever since. After coming to Uddiyana, she realized that Akagi’s photo of a family looking at the horizon was a prayer that expressed belief in a tomorrow. She said that life and death went hand-in-hand in Uddiyana and that it was initially a shock because she’d never seen so much death before. She saw that no matter how deep people’s despair was, they kept praying because the light of hope hadn’t gone out. She said she realized that she knew what kind of photos she wanted to take after being in Uddiyana. She thanked Akagi for everything and said she finally understood what he’d been telling her for years about photography. Later, Akagi returns to Tokyo and meets Lisa at a bar. She comments that it’s been three months since Uddiyana and that she couldn’t bear to look at him on that day. She wonders what the UN’s goal was since they had Shirasu document so many things only to confiscate her pictures and never disclose that the flag had even been stolen. Akagi thinks they wanted an insurance policy to boost the flag’s value. But after finding out that Ru Pou was behind the theft and had powerful international backing, they decided to act like the whole thing never happened. Akagi blames himself for giving Shirasu an airplane ticket. Lisa mentions that she heard Akagi was editing the photos that Shirasu left him, and he said he’s working on it because he needs closure. Lisa said she wants to see them when he’s done and he promises to show them to her. She then gets up to leave because she’s flying back to Uddiyana tomorrow. She vows that she’ll take enough photos to cover Shirasu’s share. Reflecting on events, Akagi thinks that sometimes a photo can bring peace back and believes that Shirasu’s flag photo did exactly that.
FLAG’s finale ends on a bittersweet note. After risking her life to document the efforts of the SDC to recover the flag, Shirasu is killed in an insurgent attack at the airport. The episode’s opening scene captures her final moment and casts a shadow over the whole thing. With her gone, the full weight of the story is on Akagi now as he tries to grapple with what’s happened. It’s an unfortunate truth that many journalists are killed in war as they risk their lives to document what’s happening. Still, Shirasu’s work had meaning and Eversalt ensured that the world would eventually be able to see what she did. In terms of wrapping up the story, there’s still some dangling bits left unresolved. What was Ru Pou’s ultimate goal, and how did he end up getting China’s backing? What’s in it for them? Also, did the UN take any retaliatory action toward him, or did they leave him alone? We don’t get to see any of the SDC team this episode to hear how they reacted to Shirasu’s death. To connect the storylines more, I think it would’ve been fitting if Akagi tracked them all down to interview them. One structural criticism I have for the entire series is that between Shirasu and Akagi, both our viewpoint characters are Japanese – foreigners. What we never truly see is the viewpoint of an Uddiyanan citizen and how they interpret the conflict. We see that just a bit in Akagi’s interviews with the former Kufura, but she’s definitely not a typical citizen. Overall, FLAG is a solid series and I appreciate the way that it chose to tell its story – not only by having journalists as main characters, but by having everything we see essentially be their “work product.” It makes you feel like you’re watching a documentary rather than an anime series, and that was a refreshing change for the genre. It’s also an evolution from Takashi’s experimentation with storytelling in Gasaraki, where all the story’s exposition was told through news reports from around the world. FLAG is definitely a hidden gem and it’s a shame that the series has flown under the radar all this time. It will never get as much attention as other Takahashi works like VOTOMS, Dougram or Layzner, but it has earned its place within his long filmography.
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