The or , officially , is a green and yellow V-shaped symbol that beginner drivers in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

must display at the designated places at the front and the rear of their cars for one year after they obtain a standard

driver's license A driver's license, driving licence, or driving permit is a legal authorization, or the official document confirming such an authorization, for a specific individual to operate one or more types of motorized vehicles—such as motorcycles, ca ...

. Drivers who consider themselves beginners may continue to display the sign, even after the period of a year. Like the orange and yellow "''fukushi'' mark" or " ''kōreisha'' mark" that denotes elderly drivers, the shoshinsha mark is designed to warn other drivers that the marked driver is not very skilled, either due to inexperience or old age. In Japan the shoshinsha mark is also used beyond the driving context to indicate beginner status. In Tochigi, for example, new mothers are issued a card with the mark on it to indicate their experience level to health and child care support staff. New employees of companies may also have the mark on their name badges until they become more experienced. In video games, it is associated with tutorials and new players. In the anime ''

Sgt. Frog ''Sgt. Frog'', known in Japan as , is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Mine Yoshizaki. It was launched in '' Monthly Shōnen Ace'' in April 1999. The story follows the attempts of a platoon of frog-like alien invaders t ...

'', the character Tamama has a mirrored shoshinsha mark on his hat and stomach.

Georgists Georgism, in modern times also called Geoism, and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that people should own the value that they produce themselves, while the economic rent derived from land—includ ...

have begun using the symbol as an online

identifier An identifier is a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object or a unique ''class'' of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, person, physical countable object (or class thereof), or physical mass ...

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

due to its resemblance to a shield. The mark is represented in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

as U+1F530 (🔰), as part of the

Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from ...

block.

References

External links

What are all these mysterious Japanese car stickers?

WHAT ARE THOSE STICKERS ON JAPANESE CARS?
{{DEFAULTSORT:Shoshinsha Mark Law of Japan Road transport in Japan Traffic law

See also

References

External links