Messages Without Words (Asian)

I've started a collection of warning signs without words. I remember in high school when a classmate wrote a paper about Yucca Mountain and the need to find a way to label radioactive waste in such a way that a sentient being encountering it tens of thousands of years from now will know it's poisonous and dangerous. Think of the challenge inherent in that exercise! 10,000 years ago, humans were just figuring out how to grow crops and domesticate animals. (Well, okay maybe we'd been at it for a few thousand years. But still.) In ten thousand years, will sentient beings on earth even consider radiation to be poisonous? Will they look human, so images depicting sick people will mean something to them? Given the possibility of large-scale nuclear holocaust or power plant accident, this doesn't seem too implausible to me.

Well, on to slightly lighter sign uses in the near term.

This one is very nicely done. It's in Japanese, but if you've ever had a fountain drink you're pretty clear on what to do. Empty the contents, stack the cups, get rid of the accessories. How hard would this be to do in the US, I ask you? Note that the sequence seems to go from right to left (nonstandard for an American like me). Click on the image for a larger version. Taken at the Tokyo Dome.

A slightly less transparent sign, also from the Tokyo Dome. This is featured above the exit doors. Prepare for great disruption! You will be blown about and lose your hat! Old ladies should not sit down! Injured people should not point their hypodermic needles at their toes! Babies should not feel their pregnant mothers' bellies! No deliveries! No heels! My goodness, what the heck was that all about???

From a freeway onramp outside of Shanghai, China. No tractors, motorcycles, buses (with some specific information, illegible at this range), bicycles, horse-drawn carts, or pedestrians. Okay. That leaves what exactly? To me this sign is indicative of the variety in transportation still in use in China. I've got a picture of a truck full of pigs on the highway somewhere around here...

Turnabout is fair play; I've got some English signs to share next time as well, from our Oregon trip.