Why is the STOP sign in Japan a triangle, not an octagon?

Question

I am driving in Hokkaido and I keep treating the red triangles as "yield" signs because that is what they look like in my country. Are they actually full STOP signs?

Drive This World Editorial · Accepted Answer

Yes — the **inverted red triangle with "止まれ" is a full STOP sign**, with exactly the same legal force as the US octagon. Treating it as a yield is the most common cause of intersection collisions involving foreign drivers in Japan.

Why the difference?

- Japan adopted the inverted triangle before the 1968 Vienna Convention standardized the octagon for STOP. By the time most signatories switched, Japan already had millions of these signs deployed and chose not to undertake the nationwide replacement.
- Japan re-examined this question in the 2010s. They concluded that the cost of swapping every sign would create more confusion for the (much larger) base of local drivers than it would solve for foreign drivers.

What to remember: in Japan, **red = stop or prohibition, regardless of shape**. The triangle's shape elsewhere (yield) is a coincidence — Japanese yields are essentially conveyed by markings and 徐行 (slow) signs instead.

We have a comparison page at /guides/stop-signs-around-the-world that puts the four major variants side by side.

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