Lately I've been reading a book based on coloured-in black and white photographs of Kyoto around the Meiji Era. I only just found out through it that Japan's flag used to look different, it was a bigger red circle off-centre with red rays coming out of it on a white background. It looks more original and more clearly shows that it's a sun, although it looks less like a flag. I think they changed it after the war.

My Japanese teacher told us about the Genji Monogatari which is a 1000 year old story written by a woman in the Heian era, I got a book with little pictures from it from the library. The real version is something like 50 volumes long, but there are lots of shortened versions of it.