We'd like to use analytics cookies to understand which symbols people look up, so we know what to research next. They are not used for advertising and we set none of them unless you say yes. What we store.
Six vegetation and cultivation marks that divide the Japanese countryside between them, arranged as the three pairs a reader actually has to tell apart.
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.
| Japanese map symbol for a rice paddy | Japanese map symbol for a dry field | Japanese map symbol for broadleaf forest | Japanese map symbol for needleleaf forest | Japanese map symbol for a bamboo grove | Japanese map symbol for bamboo grass | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japanese name | 田 — ta | 畑 — hatake | 広葉樹林 — kōyōjurin | 針葉樹林 — shin'yōjurin | 竹林 — chikurin | 笹地 — sasachi |
| Its pair | The dry field — the other half of cultivated land. | The paddy — the other half of cultivated land. | Needleleaf forest — the other half of woodland. | Broadleaf forest — the other half of woodland. | Bamboo grass — the other half of bamboo cover. | The bamboo grove — the other half of bamboo cover. |
| The one feature that separates them | How the two strokes are drawn. | How the two strokes are drawn. | The canopy is rounded. | The canopy is pointed. | It is woodland — timber bamboo standing tall. | It is ground cover — dwarf sasa at knee height. |
| What it tells you about the ground | Wet, level, and bunded into flooded terraces. | Drained and worked, and not held under water. | Warmer or lower ground; the cover changes with the season. | Colder or higher ground; the cover does not change. | Managed or long-established stands, often near settlement. | Rough upland cover, common where forest thins out. |
| Why it is easy to mistake | The two commonest symbols on a rural sheet, drawn at the same size. | The two commonest symbols on a rural sheet, drawn at the same size. | The canopy shape is a few points across and is repeated small. | The canopy shape is a few points across and is repeated small. | Both are bamboo and both are called bamboo in English. | Both are bamboo and both are called bamboo in English. |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a dry field — The dry field is marked with two short upright strokes; the paddy mark is the other of the two cultivated-land symbols and is drawn alike at map scale. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a rice paddy — The paddy field is the other of the two cultivated-land marks, and the pair are the commonest symbols on a rural Japanese map. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for needleleaf forest — The needleleaf mark is the same tree on the same trunk stroke with a pointed canopy instead of a rounded one. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for broadleaf forest — The broadleaf mark is the same tree on the same trunk stroke with a rounded canopy instead of a pointed one. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for bamboo grass — 笹地 is dwarf sasa growing as ground cover, not the timber bamboo woodland this mark stands for. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a bamboo grove — 竹林 is timber bamboo growing as woodland, not the dwarf sasa ground cover this mark stands for. |
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.
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.
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.