The Soviets complained that Ota’s design (left) had no door; the Japanese delegation complained that the vertical line between the door and the doorframe in the Soviet design (right) made it more difficult to recognize the figure of the runner.
For Ota, the most remarkable thing was not that his design won but how similar his design was to the Soviets’. They, too, had submitted a figure of a man running out a door. He was amazed that two design teams, working independently, would develop such similar concepts, and the coincidence convinced him of the essential rightness of the running man. He came to believe he had designed not just Yukio Ota’s exit sign, not just a Japanese exit sign, but a fundamentally human exit sign, one that speaks to some primal cognitive notion of escape.
The Slate article is great - Americans are a strongly anti-iconographic culture. Most of their state flags are terrible, for example, because they are besotted with lettering. American overseas territories are even worse - the American Virgin Islands, for my money, has quite possibly the worst national or quasi-national flag ever designed. Which makes it all the more mystifying that they landed upon such a winner for a national flag design.
The Slate article notes too the American “EXIT” comes from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, when 146 garment workers, mostly women, died. The problem there, however, was not just a lack of exit signs; it was that the owners kept the exits locked.
