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Several Japanese map symbols exist as a plain form and a circled form of the same device. The circle is not decoration — it is a rank.
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.
| Japanese map symbol for a school | Japanese map symbol for a high school | Japanese map symbol for a police box | Japanese map symbol for a police station | Japanese map symbol for a government office | Japanese map symbol for a town or village office | Japanese map symbol for a city hall | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japanese name | 学校 — gakkō | 高等学校 — kōtōgakkō | 交番 — kōban | 警察署 — keisatsusho | 官公署 — kankōsho | 町村役場 — chōson yakuba | 市役所 — shiyakusho |
| The device | The character 文, for writing and letters. | The same character 文. | Crossed truncheons. | The same crossed truncheons. | A plain open circle with nothing inside it. | A circle with a smaller filled disc inside it. | A doubled circle. |
| Circled? | No — the plain character. | Yes, and the circle is the only difference. | No — the plain device. | Yes, and the circle is the only difference. | The mark is itself a circle; there is no plain-versus-circled pair here. | The same, with the interior carrying the distinction. | The same, with a second ring rather than a disc. |
| What it marks | A primary or lower secondary school. | A senior high school. | A kōban — a staffed neighbourhood police post. | A full police station. | A public office for which no more specific symbol exists. | A town or village office. | A city hall, or a Tokyo ward office. |
| How to read it quickly | Bare character: the ordinary school. | Character in a ring: the higher school. | Bare truncheons: the small post on the corner. | Truncheons in a ring: the station. | Empty inside: the general case. | Solid dot inside: town or village. | Ring inside: city. |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a high school — The same 文 device drawn inside a circle marks a high school. The plain character is a primary or lower secondary school. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a school — The same 文 device without the circle is a primary or lower secondary school. The circle is the whole of the difference. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a police station — The same crossed truncheons inside a circle mark a full police station rather than a kōban. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a police box — The same crossed truncheons without the circle mark a kōban — a neighbourhood police box, not a station. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a city hall — A doubled circle marks a city hall. This plain single circle is the general public-office mark.; Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a town or village office — A circle enclosing a smaller filled disc is a town or village office. This mark is a plain circle with nothing inside it. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a city hall — A city hall is marked with a doubled circle rather than a circle enclosing a filled disc.; Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a government office — A plain circle with nothing inside it is the general public-office mark, used where no more specific symbol applies. | Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a government office — A plain single circle is the general public-office mark, not a city hall.; Commonly confused with Japanese map symbol for a town or village office — A town or village office is marked with a circle enclosing a filled disc rather than a doubled circle. |
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.
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.