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Two crossed tools at the same size on the same map, separated only by the head of the second tool.
Look at the second tool's head. Two picks crossed is a quarry, where stone is cut. A pick crossed with a hammer is a mine, where ore or coal is worked. Nothing else about the two marks differs — same size, same crossing point, same weight of line — so at 1:25,000 the difference is a few printed points across, and it is the first thing lost in a photocopy or a phone photograph. If the heads are not legible, the surrounding detail usually settles it: a quarry is drawn against a cut face and a mine against an adit or shaft.
The mine mark is a pick crossed with a hammer. This one is two picks, and the head of the second tool is the only difference.
| Japanese map symbol for a quarry | Japanese map symbol for a mine | |
|---|---|---|
| Japanese name | 採石地 — saisekichi | 採鉱地 — saikōchi |
| The two tools | Two picks. | A pick and a hammer. |
| What is extracted | Stone, cut from a face. | Ore or coal, worked from a shaft or adit. |
| If the heads are illegible | Look for a cut face or terracing drawn around the mark. | Look for an adit, a shaft, or spoil drawn around the mark. |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a mine — The mine mark is a pick crossed with a hammer. This one is two picks, and the head of the second tool is the only difference. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a quarry — The quarry mark is two picks crossed. This one is a pick crossed with a hammer. |
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.
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.