Noboru

Noboru is a verb meaning 'go up'. In the meaning of 'climb stairs', it is written in Chinese characters and hiragana as . The following sign follows this usage (noboru appears in the -te form nobotte):

O-te-arai Kaidan o nobotte hidari-kawa desu Lavatory Up the stairs on the left

It is relatively common, however, to write native verbs like noboru in hiragana as . For instance, the example below is a similar sign in another railway station also directing users to the station conveniences:

O-te-arai wa kaidan nobotte konkōsu ni arimasu. The toilets are up the stairs in the concourse.

A Google search in August 2003 revealed the following pattern of usage for nobotte on the Internet:

Form	No. of occurrences
	234,000
	82,000

There are other characters that are used for writing noboru (, ) which are not relevant here because they have slightly different usages.