How to display Regional Status Indicators (country flags) in the terminal

Question

How do you display Regional Status Indicators (things like country flags) in the Linux Terminal? Is this even possible?

I'm programming a VPN client and would like to include some flags for the countries the client includes. For example, I would like to display the Japan flag (🇯🇵). I pasted the two Unicode symbols 🇯 and 🇵 next to each other in a Bash script, but upon running the script in the Terminal, I just got the two symbols next to each other (they didn't "merge"). For example purposes I have part of the file below (note there is a space between the symbols so they don't "merge" in the browser, the space is not there in the real script).

#!/bin/bash
echo "Please choose a server:"
echo -e "🇯 🇵 Japan (1)"     # in the real script there is no space here.
echo -e "..."
read -p "> " choice
...

And upon running:

$ ./script.sh
Please choose a server:
🇯 🇵 Japan (1)            [ with no space in between ]
...

I understand the concept of Regional Status Indicators, but my question is if it's possible to use them in the terminal.

Edit: I noted that some answerers were having trouble understanding my problem, so I provided a screenshot of what my terminal looks like when I run this script.

Answer 1

Not sure if you copied the correct byte sequences, but you can simply use the correct escapes instead:

$ echo -e "\U1f1ef\U1f1f5 Japan (1)"
🇯🇵 Japan (1)

It may also be an issue with your terminal understanding the Unicode sequence and rendering it properly, rather than a problem with your script.