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Japan to add first new symbol to maps in 13 years, can you guess what it means?

Scott Wilson
Mar 18, 2019

It’s not for labeling popsicle stands, or caves, or tongues, or…

If you’ve never taken a look at a Japanese map before, then you may not know that they use some different symbols compared to the rest of the world.

For example, here’s a screenshot from Google Maps showing a part of Mitaka Ward in Tokyo:

▼ You can see the 〒 symbol for the post office, the 文 symbol for schools, the ◎ symbol
for the city office, and the Y-like symbol in the bottom right for the fire station.

Google Maps

Of course the details of the symbols go much deeper than that. There are dozens and dozens of symbols for different types of buildings and areas.

▼ Here’s a small sampling of just 24 common ones.
(Translation below)

Top row: (1) City hall, (2) Town/village hall, (3) Gov. office, (4) Elementary/middle school, (5) High school, (6) Post office, (7) Court, (8) Fire station

Middle row: (1) Hospital, (2) Buddhist temple, (3) Shrine, (4) Power plant, (5) Factory, (6) Police, (7) Three-way intersection, (8) Benchmark

Bottom row: (1) Mulberry field, (2) Wasteland, (3) Broad-leaf forest, (4) Coniferous forest, (5) Rice field, (6) Cultivated land, (7) Orchard, (8) Tea field

With just a quick glance at those symbols, one of them may jump out at you: the symbol for Buddhist temples, the manji. It has an unfortunate resemblance to the swastika, something that has been controversial in the past and whose change has been advocated for, but is still in regular use.

Despite already having a ton of map symbols, Japan has been adding a steady stream of new ones over the past decades, though it seemed as though they’d finally hit a stopping point.

The last two new symbols were added in 2006, thirteen years ago.

▼ They were the symbol for windmill, which is kind of cool…

▼ …and the symbol for retirement home, which is not only hilarious with its
cane inside a house, but it being symbolic of modern Japan too.

But on the 15th of this month, the Japanese Geographical Survey Institute announced that they would be adding a new symbol to maps.

Here’s a glimpse of what the symbol looks like. Can you guess what what it means?

▼ Scroll down for some hints and then the answer!

https://twitter.com/reisikirem/status/1106706879672020992

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▼ Hint #1: It’s not a symbol for portals to other dimensions, sorry.

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▼ Hint #2: It’s marking a single, usually somewhat small, thing.
Not a building or an area.

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▼ Final hint: It may look a little something like this.

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▼ Answer: It’s a symbol to mark memorial stones honoring victims of natural disasters.

Did you guess right? Were you even close? No worries if you weren’t. Here’s what Japanese netizens guessed when they first saw the symbol:

“Metal detector.”
“A mail box.”
“Vending machines.”
“I figured maybe a charge spot for electric cars. I was wrong.”
“I thought it was for a public restroom… but we already have a symbol for that.”
“Is it for monoliths?”

That last guess isn’t bad, but the rest make my personal guess of “hot potato vendor” sound reasonable.

▼ Some also pointed out that the symbol bears a striking resemblance to Game Freak’s logo.

After the huge floods in western Japan last year, there were more stone memorials to the victims put up than in the past hundred years, and the Japanese Geographical Survey Institute wanted their locations to be more known. The symbol for the memorials will start going up online starting June this year, and in print maps starting in September.

Marking the memorials on maps is a nice gesture to the municipalities that put them up. Now if we could just get them to add in a symbol for memorials to otaku-penguins….

Source: Nikkei via My Game News Flash
Images: SoraNews24
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