I don't see anything particularly special about these symbols. Don't get me wrong, I like Japan but while these icons look nice, don't most symbols already speak without words?

I always find it interesting to learn about symbols or iconography that a culture takes for granted that would be unknown or even invisible to an outsider.

Japanese heraldry is particularly captivating because of its apparent influence on corporate logo design of the 1960s. Between mon and traditional Japanese architecture, it’s eye-opening to see parallels between post-war American modernism and millennia of Japanese design.

In the spirit of this article, Cabel Sasser [1] once jokingly referred to U+1F4DB as “tofu on fire,” but eventually learned it is universally understood by Japanese people as a child’s school name tag.

[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/cabel.panic.com/post/3lxusfd6f5k2c

For a non-Japanese example, it wasn’t until I visited Europe that the “fleeing man” universally used for exit signage over there would have meant anything to me. You can drop that icon into something and immediately convey danger, flight to safety, etc.

What should be viewed as more unique actually is how verbose North America is. Especially in the car part that I know of, watching car reviews online - road signs or even buttons in a vehicle that would be symbols in Europe or Asia are written out.

Due to a favorable exchange rate a lot of people are traveling to Japan these days, and encountering these unfamiliar symbols for the first time and perhaps wondered what they mean.

My reading of it is that it isn't the use of symbols that is notable, but rather here are a few handfuls of roles that symbolic decals and signs have been given in Japan, most of which we don't have in North America at least. A lot of them are quite smart. Sure, the special badge for the front of a police or fire vehicle is pretty redundant, but it would be nice if we had a universal understanding of a couple of these just as we understand what the blue handicap icon means. I would nominate the best as:

1. The cross + heart one for people with hidden disabilities. This is probably top of mind for me because I have a family member who could use some extra understanding due to a condition.

2. The new driver, elderly driver, and deaf driver. The first one is obviously so useful that we've just created dozens of one-off text decals (clearly inferior, as they have to be noticed, read, and interpreted, rather than just recognized). It should be handed to you along with your permit and made compulsory like Japan describes.

As for the elderly one, it would be useful to tip us off to give them more space, and also to inspire us to think of our grandmas when we see such a car making a mistake on the road, instead of defaulting to assuming the driver is a deliberately uncourteous prick as we sometimes do.

(As for the "if people are too old to drive correctly, we should take their licenses away" argument, let's assume it's been made, and that someone has pointed out the tradeoffs of that policy in the real world that we live in.)

They are interesting for a variety of reasons. One of which is, while some are similar in function to, say, the "handicapped tag" that gets you pick of the best parking spaces in the United States, they are mainly enforced through social convention rather than law. This gives the symbols greater reach than laws, encouraging helpful behavior that can't be effectively legislated. Because Japanese culture is based on social harmony and mutual respect for norms, they're actually effective.

Secondly, because they are enforced by social convention, they can be very abstract which helps to reduce stigma. The aforementioned handicapped sign is clearly an abstract silhouette of a person in a wheelchair, which is very, very on the nose compared to a butterfly, clover, or heart. Similarly, the bicolor chevron indicating "new driver" (which I first encountered as a roll-up item in the Katamari Damacy series) is a whole lot less obtrusive than the "dunce cap" worn by driver-education vehicles in the USA (typically, a large sign or signs reading "STUDENT DRIVER" or similar mounted on the roof of the car). American drivers would prickle at having to have something like the "dunce cap" on their vehicles for a year after getting their license, but if it were an obvious but unobtrusive and abstract symbol like the chevron, public support for requiring the symbol on the vehicles of even newly licensed drivers (probably a good idea) would increase.

There is a general culture that one sometimes sees which treats anything related to Japan as highly remarkable. Ancient Japanese swords can literally cut through diamond like butter by being folded over 1 000 times after all.