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Safety and Cognition

Shisa Kanko (Pointing and Calling)

Reference entry · last updated September 6, 2026

Shisa kanko (指差喚呼), pointing and calling, is a Japanese occupational-safety method in which a worker points at an indicator that needs checking and calls out its name and status aloud.[1] It began on Japanese railways in the early twentieth century, spread through Japanese industry, and has been adopted by transit systems in New York, Toronto, and elsewhere.[1][2][3] A 1994 laboratory experiment by Japan's Railway Technical Research Institute is the source of the widely repeated figure that the combined method cuts errors by almost 85 percent.[3] This entry covers the method, its history, the evidence for it, where it is used, and its limits.

Definition

Pointing and calling is an occupational-safety practice for avoiding mistakes: the worker points at an indicator that matters and says its status aloud. On Japanese railways it goes by shisa kanko, shisa kakunin kanko, or yubisashi koshō, and railways in mainland China, Taiwan, and Indonesia use their own names for the same practice. The Japan Industrial Safety and Health Association recommends it, and Chinese railway management regulations include it.[1]

The gesture and the utterance are both addressed to the worker. A 2025 account of teaching the method to paramedic students lists, among the lessons of implementation, "clarifying that P&C is a personal cognitive tool, not a directive to others."[6]

History

Accounts of the origin agree on the setting and differ on the dates. Wikipedia places the start in Japan in the early 1900s, when steam locomotives predominated and drivers and boilermen called out signal status to each other, with pointing added a few decades later.[1] A 2018 aviation-safety account repeats the story that the practice "is said to have begun in the early 20th century when a steam train driver became concerned about his vision getting worse," and that "by 1913, this practice was encoded in a railway manual and evolved into point and call."[3] Nippon.com dates the addition of pointing to the late 1920s and reports that in 1970 the former Japanese National Railways first wrote the requirement to point when calling out signals into its regulations.[2]

Evidence

The best-known evidence is a 1994 experiment by the Railway Technical Research Institute, in which volunteers completed a simple but variable task under several confirmation conditions. With no special steps, they made 2.38 errors per 100 actions; when they both pointed and called, the rate fell to 0.38 errors per 100 actions, a reduction of almost 85 percent.[3] The same result is reported as the error rate falling to one-sixth.[2]

Later laboratory work has tested the components separately. Shinohara and colleagues examined the effects of finger pointing and calling on cognitive control in a task-switching paradigm in 2013.[4] Mitobe and Higuchi (2017) tested whether finger-pointing helped nurses discriminate between similar drug names in a choice reaction time task. Error rates were higher for nurses than for students, and "nurses did not receive a benefit from finger-pointing"; the authors suggest that "finger-pointing may have been inadequate to lead to accurate recognition of complex stimuli, such as drug names."[5]

A 2025 systematic review of railway implementations found ten studies meeting its criteria and reports that pointing and calling "has been shown to reduce subway door opening errors in Toronto by 53% and signal violations in San Diego by 38%."[7]

Use outside Japanese railways

New York City Subway conductors must point at a black-and-white striped board across from the conductor's window whenever a train enters a station, before opening the doors. The rule dates from 1996 and followed a series of incidents in which doors opened inside tunnels.[1] One account reports that within two years of implementation, incidents of incorrectly berthed trains fell by 57 percent.[3] Toronto subway guards point at a green triangle on the platform wall, and GO Transit took up the practice in March 2021.[1] Nippon.com reports that France's state railway operator and China's high-speed railways have added pointing to their coaching on the Japanese model.[2]

Outside transport, finger-pointing toward drug names is recommended in Japan for healthcare workers,[5] and pointing and calling has been integrated into an advanced-care paramedic curriculum over three weeks of instruction, guided practice, and high-fidelity simulation, with evaluation showing "positive engagement, skill uptake, and transfer to other learning contexts."[6]

Limits

The 85 percent figure comes from a simple laboratory task, not from operational records, and the accounts that carry it describe the task only in outline.[3] The one controlled study of a complex stimulus in this entry found no benefit from pointing for experienced users.[5] The sources cited here report the transit reductions as in-service before-and-after figures and do not describe control conditions.[3][7]

The Railway Technical Research Institute report itself was not consulted for this entry; its figures are given as reported by the secondary accounts cited.

Relation to reading aloud

The method pairs a physical act with a spoken one so that a check which could pass silently has to be performed. The author's essay Reading Aloud Is Pointing and Calling for Your Brain applies the same shape to dense text: reading a difficult sentence aloud forces its phrasing to be placed, so a misparse becomes audible.

The analogy to reading is the author's own; none of the studies cited here tested it.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Pointing and calling," Wikipedia. Lead, history, and use-outside-Japan sections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling
  2. ↑ "Pointing and Calling: Japan's Railway Safety Technique," Nippon.com, 9 February 2026. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g02575/
  3. ↑ "Point it, call it, get it right," Flight Safety Australia, 8 January 2018. https://www.flightsafetyaustralia.com/2018/01/point-it-call-it-get-it-right/
  4. ↑ Kazumitsu Shinohara, Hiroshi Naito, Yuko Matsui, and Masaru Hikono, "The effects of 'finger pointing and calling' on cognitive control processes in the task-switching paradigm," International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, vol. 43, no. 2, 2013, pp. 129–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ergon.2012.08.004
  5. ↑ Junko Mitobe and Takahiro Higuchi, "Accuracy of Discriminating between Similar Drug Names by Nurses: Effect of Finger-pointing on Error Prevention," Journal of Safety Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2017. https://doi.org/10.5296/jss.v3i1.11732. Free full text: https://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/jss/article/download/11732/9827
  6. ↑ Efrem Violato and Mike Cheung, "Teaching pointing and calling (Shisa Kanko) to reduce error and improve performance," Medical Teacher, vol. 48, no. 5, 2026, pp. 754–756 (published online 23 May 2025). https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2025.2508281. PubMed record: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40407057/
  7. ↑ Pristi Dwi Puspitasari and Indri Hapsari Susilowati, "A Systematic Review of The Implementation of Pointing and Calling and Risk-Triggered Commentary in The Railway Industry," Jurnal Kesmas (Kesehatan Masyarakat) Khatulistiwa, vol. 12, no. 2, 2025, pp. 98–108. https://doi.org/10.29406/jkmk.v12i2.7726. Free full text: https://openjurnal.unmuhpnk.ac.id/JKMK/article/download/7726/pdf