Wayfinding is of vital importance if visually impaired pedestrians are to walk by themselves from one place to another, since they must calculate both their orientation and position. Here, a new haptic direction indicator is proposed, which will help blind pedestrians to avoid hazardous areas intuitively and safely by means of haptic navigation. A novel translational force perception method, called the ``pseudo-attraction force'' technique, is applied to a haptic direction indicator, which exploits the nonlinear relationship between perceived acceleration and physical acceleration to generate a force sensation. An experiment was performed to clarify the perceptual characteristics when a visually impaired person held the haptic direction indicator. The results indicate that the angular resolution of directional force under 8-direction (compass) conditions was better than that under 12-direction (clock position) conditions with the haptic direction indicator. The finding constitutes a criterion for designing smaller haptic direction indicators.