road signs

I've always been mystified by signs painted onto the road and how they're written from bottom (nearer to your car) to top (farther away). I realize it's because you're supposed to encounter the words in that order and thus read them in that order, but it's never actually worked for me. Surely I can't be the only one in whom reading from top to bottom is so hard-coded that if I see there's another word up there I watch it until it's legible.

Thus, I was curious whether the road-painted words here in Japan were written the same way. The characters seemed closer together than the widely spaced words at the old ferry terminal by Kitsap Memorial Park, but that wasn't conclusive. They were in kanji, so even though I can sometimes decode that they say "something something exit" it's not like I can evaluate proper word order.

Today I was walking back into campus from Motoyama, which I haven't done before, and I found words in katakana painted on the pavement. The character closest to me was "n". Well, that settles that!

(Words never begin with the "n" character of the syllabary, because N + consonant doesn't happen there and, for N + vowel, each has its own character. See shiritori.)