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ISO standards refer to countries all the time -- ISO 3166 is literally all about countries, for instance.

I suspect this is actually shorthand for "ISO wanted to avoid referring to countries in Unicode character names". But that ship has clearly sailed nowadays with characters like U+1F5FE ("SILHOUETTE OF JAPAN").

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> SILHOUETTE OF JAPAN

This may sound pedantic, but Japan the island or Japan the nation? It seems to refer to the island(s). On the other hand, the "farsi symbol" is of a particular nation rather than a given set of boundaries. Nations can be renamed, but the island of Japan refers to the chunk of earth. Add to that that nations get redrawn every so often in the middle east and I can understand the position.

Japan is not an island. Having a distinct symbol for the 4 large islands comprising most of Japan is definitely a political statement, if not an especially controversial one.

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