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One mark drawn two ways, where the direction of the teeth is the difference between ground that was built up and ground that was dug out.
Follow the teeth. They always point downhill. Teeth running outward and away from the crest line mean the ground was built up — an embankment carrying a road or railway above the surrounding land. Teeth running inward, towards the line, mean the ground was cut away — a cutting taking the route below it. The two marks are deliberate mirror images of each other, which makes them easy to tell apart once you know the rule and almost impossible to guess if you do not, because both read as a line with hatching. This is one of the few map conventions where knowing a single rule settles the question permanently.
The cutting mark is this one reversed: the teeth point inward, into the excavation, instead of outward from the crest.
| Japanese map symbol for an embankment | Japanese map symbol for a cutting | |
|---|---|---|
| Japanese name | 盛土 — morido | 切土 — kirido |
| Teeth point | Outward and down, away from the crest, on both sides. | Inward and down, towards the cut. |
| The ground | Made ground — material was brought in and piled up. | Cut ground — material was excavated and removed. |
| Where the route sits | Above the land on either side of it. | Below the land on either side of it. |
| The rule to remember | Teeth always run downhill, so outward teeth mean the crest is the high point. | Teeth always run downhill, so inward teeth mean the line is the low point. |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a cutting — The cutting mark is this one reversed: the teeth point inward, into the excavation, instead of outward from the crest.; Opposite of Japanese map symbol for a cutting — Built-up ground against cut ground — the two ways a road or railway is brought to a level, and the legend draws them as mirror images on purpose. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for an embankment — The embankment mark is this one reversed: the teeth point outward and down from the crest instead of into the cut.; Opposite of Japanese map symbol for an embankment — Built-up ground against cut ground — the two ways a road or railway is brought to a level, and the legend draws them as mirror images on purpose. |
Map symbols used on Japanese topographic maps
Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI) · retrieved 2026-08-23
Japan's national mapping agency's own published legend. Cited for the form and meaning of a symbol on Japanese topographic maps; the historical origin of individual symbols is cited separately where claimed.
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.
Land cover on a Japanese map is drawn as one small motif repeated across an area rather than as a single symbol, and the categories come in pairs that differ by exactly one feature. Paddy against dry field is two small strokes drawn two ways. Broadleaf against needleleaf is a rounded canopy against a pointed one on the same trunk. Timber bamboo against dwarf sasa is woodland against ground cover. In every case the pair covers the whole of a category between them, so identifying one is really a matter of deciding which half of a pair you are looking at — which is why these six are worth reading together rather than one at a time.
A circle drawn around a Japanese map symbol raises its rank. The same 文 character is a primary or lower secondary school on its own and a high school inside a circle; the same crossed truncheons are a neighbourhood police box on their own and a full police station inside a circle. Once you know that, three separate identification problems collapse into one rule, and the reason the marks look so alike stops being a defect of the map and becomes the point of it. The circles around the public-administration marks work slightly differently and are the exception worth knowing: there the distinction is not plain-versus-circled but what sits inside the circle, and those three are genuinely easy to confuse at map scale.
If you are looking at a Japanese map, it is a manji and it marks a Buddhist temple. That is the whole answer for the great majority of people who ask this question, because the great majority encounter the figure exactly there. The manji is drawn upright with its arms hooking anticlockwise and has marked temples for centuries; the Nazi emblem is conventionally drawn tilted forty-five degrees with its arms hooking clockwise, and its meaning is entirely a product of the 1920s onward. Orientation is a guide rather than a rule — both directions occur in both traditions — so the reliable test is context: a map legend, a temple, a Buddhist or Jain object on one side; a flag, an armband, a political emblem on the other. The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan proposed dropping the manji from maps intended for foreign visitors in 2016, precisely because this confusion is common, and abandoned the change after domestic objection.