I asked the Gakuranman what it meant and he explained that the sticker was for beginner drivers. I would soon find out that the Gakuranman had more than earned this sticker, and later found out that it was just one sticker of many.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Japan offers a whole array of colorful symbols for the road, but you might not know what all of them mean. Here’s the breakdown of the four stickers you might see in Japan:

Beginners 🔰

In the US, if you take a driving class before you get your license, you usually get the honor of driving around in a car with a giant, yellow “STUDENT DRIVER” sign so everybody on the road is at least aware of your incompetence.

But once you get your license, there’s no indication that you’re a new driver. You’re free to terrorize the roads without anybody knowing that you’ve only been driving for two weeks.

Not so in Japan. For one year after you get your driver’s license in Japan, you have to put the green and yellow “beginner” sticker on the front and back of your car. It lets other drivers on the road that they should maybe give you a little more room and patience than your ordinary driver.

The official name of this sticker in Japanese is 初心運転者標識, but you might know it as the “wakaba mark” 若葉マーク, or the “green leaf mark.” I guess that the implication is that, as a driver, you’re like a fresh leaf, right out of the bud.

What’s really interesting about the wakaba mark is how far it’s spread. Even though it was created for new drivers, people from virtually every walk of life have embraced the symbol.

Car enthusiasts from around the world slap the wakaba mark on their cars, even if they’re not even remotely beginners. Games will use the symbol to indicate the “easy” or “beginner” difficulties. I’ve seen pictures of wakaba stickers slapped onto computer cases. There’s a wakaba emoji. Hell, I even found this picture of a horse with the wakaba mark on it. New rider, I guess?

It’s cool to me that the wakaba mark has spread so far beyond its intended purpose and is so widely understood. Could the wakaba mark one day become the universal symbol for beginners? Time will tell.

Elderly People

At the beginning and end of people’s driving careers, they tend to not drive as well. In the beginning, it’s because of inexperience; towards the end, it’s because judgement and reaction time aren’t what they used to be.

The way that the Japanese tackle the issue of elderly drivers is, you guessed it, with another sticker. It’s called the 高齢運転者標識, or the “koreisha mark” (“koreisha” meaning “elderly”) for short.

Drivers aged 70 and older have to display the koreisha sticker on their car. It can let other drivers on the road know to have a little more patience with a driver with this particular sticker on their car. Plus, you get other perks like reserved parking spaces.

Koreisha means “elderly,” but people have given the mark other, less flattering names. Instead of the green leaf mark of beginner drivers, people will sometimes call it the autumn leaf, dried leaf, or even fallen leaf mark.

As you might imagine, the image of a withered, dried up, fallen leaf is kind of an offensive way to describe the elderly. Because of this branding problem, in 2011 the koreisha mark changed from the orange and yellow teardrop shaped sticker to a bright, colorful clover symbol.

The change to the new symbol wasn’t that long ago, so you still might see the former koreisha symbol around on cars in Japan.

Handicapped People

Like the US, Japan also has a catch-all handicapped permit for cars. Unlike the US, Japan has doesn’t always use the International Symbol of Access, the universally recognizable symbol of a person in a wheelchair on a blue background.

Instead, Japan also uses a weird, four-leaf clover umbrella symbol called the 身体障害者標識. It’s supposed to be encompass more disabilities than the obvious physical disabilities represented by the International Symbol of Access.

Plus, it fits in with the rest of the other, nature-themed stickers, and disabled otaku can go nuts over having a sticker nicknamed the “yotsuba mark.”

Hearing-Impaired People

Aside from the general handicapped sticker, Japan also has one just for hearing-impaired people. The symbol (called 聴覚障害者標識 in Japanese) is yellow and green, and supposed to represent two ears arranged as a butterfly.

I get that it’s supposed to fit in with the nature theme, but an ear butterfly sounds like something you would find in a serial killer’s house.

So if you’re ever driving in Japan and see one of these stickers, give those drivers a little more room, consideration, and patience. Who knows? The Gakuranman might even be behind the wheel.

In that time, I had grown a lot and also forgotten what Japan was like, so when we went, there were a lot of things I saw that really surprised me.

I realize that you should always approach other cultures with an open mind, but there were four things that really shocked me about Japan:

Gender

My undergraduate thesis was about Japanese gender roles, so I have at least some background the politics of gender and sexuality in Japan.

Even given that, I was still surprised at how many protections women have from pervs at basically every turn.

It was everywhere — men weren’t always allowed to go into photobooths on their own, cameras were required by law to play a sound when taking a picture, there were segregated train cars, and signs warning about perverts on trains.

Not to mention the whole scandal about the poor AKB48 woman shaving her head and being demoted for the crime of having a boyfriend. That’s another issue entirely, but The Japan Times has a good write up about the scandal.

Thankfully, I never saw anybody got groped or harassed or anything while we were in Japan. But all of the signs (literally and figuratively) were still there, and the more I saw them, the more they bothered me.

Accessibility

The US is pretty good on being accessible to people with disabilities but holy hell, Japan does a lot for the disabled.

You notice it most in the big train stations, where bumpy plastic floors stretch as far as the eye can see. These floors help blind people to better navigate on their own, with different textures indicating different areas of the station (i.e., stairs, elevators, walkways).

There are other aids for blind people too — braille on signs, speakers playing sounds at regular intervals at different parts of the station (usually at escalators).

That on its own isn’t especially remarkable, but there was more outside of the train stations. Japanese sign language being taught on TV. Braille on the tops of beer cans. It all added up to a very impressive effort to help people with disabilities.

This is in defiance of how inaccessible a lot of Japan can be. Still though, it was nice to see the Japanese making an effort in public areas.

Booze

The US has a complicated relationship with alcohol. Americans love they booze, but there are plenty of restrictions on the stuff.

Aside from the historical context of Prohibition, the US really works aggressively to curb underage drinking, and there are limits on where you can sell alcohol, what kinds you can sell, and where you can consume it.

In the US, I assume I’m going to be carded whenever I buy alcohol. I usually have my card out before I’m even asked. Lots of places in the US card everybody, regardless of if they look 16 or 60, but the whole time we were in Japan I was only asked once.

It was at a 7/11, as I was buying a can of chuhai (the best drink ever). The screen in front of the register asked me if I was old enough to drink, but the only button I could press was a giant YES.

Japan also doesn’t have open container laws like the US does, meaning that it’s ok to drink alcohol on the street. Given, there are cultural attitudes towards walking around and drinking that stops most people from strolling around and getting trashed, but there’s not really many legal repercussions.

I don’t really know if Japan’s attitudes towards alcohol is better or worse than America’s. It was definitely way more convenient for me to buy and drink booze in Japan, but I don’t know if that’s always a good thing.

Mascots

I’ve known for a while that mascots were in a lot of places, but man, they were everywhere.

No matter how small the town or how insignificant the landmark, it seemed like the Japanese had a way to anthropomorphize and monetize the living shit out of it.

I understand why these places try to use cute mascots to make some money and attract tourists, but the extent to which I saw it was just mind-boggling. It also strikes me as such a uniquely Japanese phenomenon that I can’t really think of another place in the world that does this.

The downside? I saw my arch-nemesis, Kumamon, everywhere we went in Japan. It didn’t matter that I was hundreds of miles away from Kumamon’s hometown, the little bastard followed me all up and down the country. I’m on to you, bear.

If you’ve been, what’s shocked you about Japan? What stood out and really surprised you? Tell me in the comments!