Japanese Laundry Symbols Guide — Every symbol on a Japanese care label, drawn and explained

Japanese care labels use the international system

Until 2016 Japan had its own set of 22 laundry symbols, with Japanese text inside them. In December 2016 the standard changed to JIS L 0001, which follows ISO 3758, the system used across Europe. The new set has 41 symbols and no text, so a label you find in a Japanese shop today can be read by anyone who knows the international symbols.

If you own older Japanese clothes you may still see the old marks: a tub with 洗濯機 written inside, or a shirt shape for hand washing. Those are pre-2016 labels and are not covered here.

Labels from the United States use a related but different set (ASTM), which relies more on text and does not show temperatures as numbers, so the numbers on Japanese labels can be unfamiliar to Americans.

The five symbol families

Every care label lists the symbols in the same order, one from each family:

• Wash tub: washing. The number is the maximum water temperature in °C; a hand in the tub means hand wash only.
• Triangle: bleaching. An empty triangle allows any bleach, diagonal stripes mean oxygen bleach only.
• Square: drying. A circle inside is the tumble dryer (dots for heat); lines inside show how to air dry (vertical to hang, horizontal to lay flat, a corner stroke for shade).
• Iron: ironing, with one to three dots for low, medium and high temperature.
• Circle: professional cleaning. P and F are dry-cleaning solvents, W is professional wet cleaning.

Lines and dots

Lines drawn under the tub or the circle mean the item needs a gentler process: one line is a gentle or delicates cycle (about half the normal load and reduced agitation), two lines a very gentle cycle such as a wool or hand-wash program.

Dots show heat. On the tumble-dry symbol one dot is low heat and two dots normal heat. On the iron one dot is up to 110°C, two dots up to 150°C and three dots up to 200°C.

Matching the label to a Japanese washing machine

Most Japanese machines wash in cold tap water by default and have no heater, so a 40°C or 60°C label simply tells you the maximum; washing cooler is always fine. The gentle-cycle symbols correspond to the おしゃれ着 (delicates), ドライ or 手洗い course on the dial.

Tumble dryers are less common in Japanese homes than in North America, and many apartments rely on air drying, which is why the hang-dry, flat-dry and shade-dry symbols appear so often on Japanese labels.