An extra effort would have been just to add a landscape at the bottom. It's just a picture of the sun.
The reason Japan is called the land of the rising sun is because of the translation of its native name, 日本。
The first Kanji, 日, is for sun or day (nichi), which is pronounced ni. The second Kanji, 本, can mean book or origin, both pronounced hon. Putting together the two, you get nihon or nippon depending on how you merge the two sounds, and its literal meaning is sun origin. The two pronunciations arise because the second syllable starts with H.
にほん to pronounce the H, and にっぽん to morph the H to ppo.
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