"The Karate Kid (1984)"—the karate boy should have had a headband with a Rising Sun motif wrapped around his head, but now it's not the Rising Sun and is just an ordinary tenugui (a Japanese cotton towel)…
In “The Karate Kid (1984)” the karate boy should have had a rising-sun headband tied around his head, but now it isn’t even a rising sun and has turned into just a tenugui. This flower pattern is a bellflower crest, similar to the Toki clan’s bellflower crest, except here the color is light blue. Also, the anthers in the pattern inside the flower extend all the way to the center on The Karate Kid side, but in a real bellflower crest they are much shorter. So even if you fold a real bellflower crest, it won’t look like a rising sun. Also, Miyagi-sensei’s model, Chogichi Miyagi, is from Okinawa, and basically in Okinawa there are no family crests, and I can’t see any relation to the bellflower crest. Also, given the period background, with the spread of the Hinomaru in Michael Jackson’s BAD and of rising-sun flags in metal bands, there was also an image of the rising-sun flag being cool, so there would have been nothing strange about using it commercially, and for a headband the rising-sun flag is the standard, and a family-crest tenugui is something even Japanese people don’t do, and the chic idea of repurposing a bellflower crest that even Japanese people wouldn’t think of and modeling it after a rising-sun flag is the more surprising move. In the first place, as noted above, even with a true bellflower crest, or the plum crest or cherry crest similarly, folding it won’t make it look like a rising sun, and the idea of modifying the pattern so that at a glance it looks like a rising sun is not the sort of idea people of the time would have come up with.
This case is part of the Mandela Effect case database based on "The Window of Opportunity: A Guidepost to the Mandela Effect — The Ultra-Secret X-Files" by Aoyama Takuto.