In modern life, we are surrounded by symbols that guide our everyday movements. When I’m driving, the red octagonal sign on the street reminds me to stop even before I read the word on the sign. And similarly, other street signs signal their meaning through their shape and their color far more than the exact lettering on them.

And still, in my life here in the United States, words are still needed to convey meaning. A perfect example is the new driver sticker that I often see on the backs of cars around here. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that Japan has many examples of symbols that convey meaning entirely on their own. There are no associated words, and they often convey mutual understanding, where the person displaying a mark and passersby both know what it means. Japan has a very long history of graphic symbols.

The most famous are probably the mon or kamon. They’re Japan’s version of the heraldic system. Unlike other forms like the famous Western coats of arms, these are very simple geometric shapes, often originating from natural sources such as plants and animals, or pure geometric shapes. These found themselves emblazoned on everything from flags and decorations on carriages and other sorts of transportation, but also as decorative designs on finely made objects.

There are over 30,000 distinct kamon designs, and many of them still remain in active use in formal life in Japan. A perfect example is the stylized paulownia. The symbol has used hundreds of years and is currently the emblem of the Japanese government ever since the Meiji Restoration.

Vehicles

A place where symbols without words naturally arise is in the world of vehicles. Every manufacturer of cars around the world puts a logo at the front of their car as a symbol of who made it. What’s interesting is that Japan takes things a little bit further with their police and fire services.

The police system in Japan is sort of a hybrid national-local system, where there is a national organization that oversees all the police, but most of the actual work is still done and organized locally. Fire systems, just like a lot of other places in the world, are mostly local.

And yet both of these systems have established some national standards. For police cars, one of those is a golden badge depicting the rising sun with rays radially around it. It is placed on police cars in lieu of the standard front badge.

It, alongside the iconic black and white color scheme and red lights on the top of the roof, is one of the most iconic signs of a Japanese police car.

On the firefighter side, there’s a similar story, where in lieu of the manufacturer mark of a car, you instead see a symbol based on a snow crystal. At the center is a sun surrounded by fire hoses, nozzles, and a water column. And it was chosen for its symbolic meanings of water, unity, and purity.

But it’s important to note that both of these symbols are supplementary in purpose. It’s pretty obvious to most people when they see a black and white car with flashing red lights on top, or a big red truck with ladders and hoses, that they’re looking at a police car or fire truck respectively.

However, that’s not the case for all transportation symbols in Japan. And I stumbled upon one of these by accident. In my many visits to transportation-related museums in Japan, I noticed that some trains had a gold winged triangle emblem (tokkyū shinboru māku) at the front.

Looking at these trains and their shape and their color, I thought that this logo was much like the big yellow cross on the RX-78 Gundam. In fact, the trains themselves looked a lot like the Gundam, or maybe the inspiration ran the other direction.

But in fact, this symbol, all the way up until the dissolution of Japan National Railway and its privatization, held a very specific function. It designated that the train it was on was a limited express train, or tokkyū service. What’s important about these is that they’re the highest level of service.

The mark on a 181 series train

And even though they might use physically similar rolling stock to other types of services, they skip many stops and require an extra fare on top of the normal fare, which pays for your journey to your destination. So from when this symbol was introduced in 1958 all the way up until 1987, it signaled to those on the platform that the train arriving was a tokkyū service, the fastest among the trains that would stop there.

Driver marks

For drivers of private vehicles in Japan, there are four symbols that everyone must understand.

The first is the shoshin untensha hyōshiki, or the new driver mark, also called the wakaba mark or the shoshinsha mark. This yellow and green V-shaped symbol is pretty well known around the world as far as Japanese symbols go. It even has its own emoji (🔰) that people often use to mark a beginner.

It’s mandatory for all new drivers to put it on their car for the first year after obtaining an automobile license. Failure to display it can result in a fine and points on your license.

I first saw this symbol at car shows, where JDM enthusiasts would add this logo as a stylistic choice to their vehicles.

Another logo like this is the kōreisha hyōshiki, or the elderly driver mark. This four-leaf clover-shaped mark is a relatively recent design, replacing a previous two-color teardrop symbol. Though it’s not mandatory to display, it’s still a good thing to put on a car. And it means that the driver is aged 70 and above.

For those who are hearing impaired, there’s the chōkaku shōgaisha hyōshiki, which is a butterfly-shaped mark in yellow and green. And this is another mandatory mark that must be placed on the car, in addition to a special wide-angle rearview mirror to give them expanded peripheral vision, since they would not be able to hear ambient traffic sounds.

And finally, for people with physical disabilities, there’s one called the shintai shōgaisha hyōshiki, also called the kurōbā māku, the clover mark, or the yotsuba māku. This one’s displayed by drivers who experience physical impairment of the limbs, meaning they’re driving with hand controls or other accessible controls. This, again, is not a requirement, but something that’s highly encouraged.

In all these cases, these symbols are well known by drivers across Japan. And the expectation is that any other driver who spots a vehicle with one of these stickers would extend extra consideration.

Transit marks

Lastly, on public transit, there are also marks very similar to the driver’s marks that are meant to convey messages that may be too difficult in writing. First is the Help Mark. It’s a luggage tag, with a white cross and a white heart, meant to be worn very visibly on the outside of the bag.

This one was designed and issued by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health as a signal to those around the wearer that this person may have a condition that, though invisible from the outside, might mean that they need assistance or consideration.

The target group here is very broad. They didn’t want to restrict this to any particular group, so they encouraged people with prosthetic limbs or artificial joints, people with internal organ conditions or chronic illnesses, people with mental illnesses, all the way to people with different forms of sensory impairment and people in early pregnancy, to use this mark.

And the unifying principle is that even though this person might not appear to have some sort of disability or a condition that they do, and that it would be best to give them some extra care in the way that you consider them.

The guidance that the government gave was that on trains and buses, you should offer your seat to one of these people, because some of them may not be able to stand and grip onto a handle or a strap for extended periods of time.

At stations and other commercial facilities, staff are expected to offer help or speak up when they see one of these people. And of course, during disasters, everyone, staff and bystanders, is expected to offer extra help and support to these people, as they may not be able to hear announcements or understand what is going on around them.

There’s a similar but much more specific mark, which is the maternity mark. And this is a keychain-style tag that, just like the help mark, is a way for someone to mark themselves as pregnant. And this is especially important for women going through their first trimester of pregnancy.

And the first trimester is extremely important because that’s the time when women are often having trouble eating and may be subject to fainting spells, even though they might look like they’re not pregnant at all.

Reading the air

So all these symbols are found all across different parts of Japanese life. What brings them together is their reliance on pure symbolism. There are no words, English, Japanese, or otherwise, that are employed. And I was curious as to why Japan has these while the US doesn’t.

I’ve read before about one of the fundamental social skills in Japan called kūki wo yomu, or reading the air. It’s essentially the ability to perceive what a situation requires and act accordingly, without anyone having to make the need explicit.

It’s a system of mutual consideration that makes everything function, from a Tokyo rush hour station where tens of thousands of people are navigating each other in near silence, to much more formal situations where the pressures are not about time, but more about formality and decency.

But the problem is that sometimes the relevant information can be invisible. A car obscures who’s actually driving it. So while it may look erratic, there might be a perfect reason why the person is driving that way. Similarly, a woman in early pregnancy might look like everyone else, but she’s subject to physical conditions that may need some help from the people around her.

So when the context is incomplete, you can’t really read the air, and then people can’t respond accordingly. The meaning-creating marks being used here seem to directly address this failure mode. They don’t mess with the social machinery of Japan, but they do supply a little bit of extra missing input to allow that machinery to engage.

So once you see a sticker on a car or a tag on someone’s bag, you know exactly how to adjust to their presence. It just allows you to better read the situation and respond.