An ambulance with a cross on the side 🚑 There is no background at all, so the finished page can be cut out and pinned to a classroom or care-home display board. White body with a red stripe is the way it looks in Japan, but any pairing works. Print it and use it straight away.
Japanese ambulances use a soft two-tone call, written in Japanese as pi-poh, which alternates between two pitches. It came in around 1970 to replace the rising and falling wail used before, which residents found harsh at night. Fire engines and patrol cars kept the sweeping siren, so people can tell from indoors which service is coming.
How many crew are on board?
A Japanese ambulance carries at least three crew. Typically that is a driver, a third crew member, and a kyukyu-kyumeishi — an emergency life-saving technician, a licensed role that may carry out advanced procedures such as securing an airway or setting up a drip, in some cases under a doctor’s instruction by radio.
How often does an ambulance go out?
Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency counts more than seven million ambulance dispatches a year — over twenty thousand a day, or roughly one every four seconds somewhere in the country — and the figure has been climbing. The number to call is 119, which reaches the fire service and an ambulance together; 110 is the police.
