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An open place of assembly, against a structure you go inside — which matters because they are used for different hazards.
An evacuation site is open ground, used when the danger is the collapse or burning of buildings. An evacuation building is a structure you enter and climb, used when the danger is water. Going to the wrong one is not a matter of convenience: an open site is the wrong place in a tsunami and a building is the wrong place in a fire.
The sheltered counterpart it is constantly mistaken for.
| Japanese evacuation site mark | Japanese evacuation building mark | |
|---|---|---|
| Where you go | Open ground. | Inside and upward. |
| Hazard it suits | Fire and structural collapse. | Water, including tsunami. |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Japanese evacuation building mark — The sheltered counterpart it is constantly mistaken for. | Commonly confused with Japanese evacuation site mark — The open-ground counterpart it is constantly mistaken for. |
JIS Z 8210 Annex: disaster-type and evacuation-site symbols (災害種別図記号)
Japanese Industrial Standards Committee / Cabinet Office of Japan · retrieved 2026-08-27
The disaster-type pictograms standardised in 2016 following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, together with the evacuation site and evacuation building marks. Cited for what each pictogram denotes, not for the safety of any particular site.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
A building's assembly point is a safe place to stand once you are outside. A ship's muster station is a staffed step in a procedure: you are counted against a roll, briefed, and if necessary allocated to a survival craft, which is why it has a letter or a number and appears on your cabin door card. Both are green, both show grouped figures, and both are called an assembly point in ordinary speech — and treating a muster station as somewhere merely to wait is the misunderstanding drills exist to correct.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.