So for me personally this "Rising sun Flag" is pretty new, but just a short Google and you'll see there's already quite some commotion about the use of this flag in Japan. It's the military flag (still used) and for japanese still seen as a symbol of peace and often use in advertisements. There was already discussions about the possebilities of the use of this flag at Tokyo's olympic games.
For koreans and chinese this flag has negativity in history though! From 1910 to 1945 the japanese ruled South Korea. There were hundreds of thousands of people within South Korea, China and even other parts of the world that have been killed. So even though within Japan this flag might mean "good", for other countries, like South Korea and China, it's quite the opposite.
So this flag, within Japan still means "good", within South Korean means "bad" (nazi flag). And the rest of the world? Either mixed or they wouldn't know. But if there's so much commotion, why would you make Sonic merchandise out of it, and if its within Japan I'd understand but out of all places its sold on the US Sega Shop? I don't get why they would do it.
This hoodie was likely supposed to promote the Tokyo Olympics and ofcourse the Sonic Olympics games you can now download on your phone. But it would've been a much better choice to just use a japanese flag as inspiration instead, not everyone knows the Rising Sun Flag and those who do know probably know the history too...
The hoodie is for sale at the US Sega Shop here. It's $39.95 or $49.95 depending on the size. I wouldn't recommend to buy this shirt for wearing though as you never know who may recognize the symbol as something negative. But I'm curious to what SEGA decides to do with this feedback, will they remove it? Or not care because it's just a small portion of the fan base? If you want to keep your SEGAShop hoodie collection as complete as possible you might want to buy it now.
~todo~ This was a funny blog-post to write while porting over articles from SonicGear to this website, I wanted to write it because I was very interested in this story on Twitter. I hope SEGA will remove this item as it will show that they care about all fans. You could say it doesn't matter much, because it is sold in the US and might mean less there, but this shop is the biggest online SEGA Shop out there, so it will be seen by many fans even if they can't buy their merchandise. This article is a blog-post for now, but all the information I could find has been send to SonicGear, so if they add it there and I port it, I can just change the category of this post + maybe add some more info (and possibly opinions?).
** update **
The Hoodie is removed from the SEGA Shop and no longer for sale, so they have listened! But will they state a message about it? Maybe we could ask at a livestream. Also did anyone buy the hoodie and will they get it? Or will they cancel all orders? Only time will tell if this hoodie will appear somewhere.