In the farce Kid Curlers by Dorothy Waldo (1916), something that "looks like a game of tic-tac-toe" is mistaken for Japanese script.  (Spoiler: it's neither.)  We wondered which X- and O-like characters of katakana might make sense in a tic-tac-toe arrangement.  Here's what we came up with:
Reading right to left, up to down, we have a call for someone not to resign due to a particular circumstance:
ya me ro (stop)
ya me na (don't quit)
me na na (because of it)