Japanese punctuation
Japanese can be written horizontally or vertically, and some punctuation marks adapt to this change in direction.
Japanese punctuation marks are usually "full width" (that is, occupying an area that is the same as the surrounding characters).
Punctuation was not widely used in Japanese writing until translations from European languages became common in the 19th century.
The comma (読点, tōten) is used in many contexts, principally for marking off separate elements within a sentence.
In horizontally written manuscripts that contain a mixture of Japanese and Western characters, the full-width comma may be incorporated as well.
However, due to visual similarity, absence from historically common encodings such as Shift JIS and EUC-JP, and ease of input on a keyboard, it is often encountered written as U+FF1D ＝ FULLWIDTH EQUALS SIGN.
In the 1990s, the group Morning Musume (モーニング娘。) began using a full stop in its name, starting a fad for this usage.
When the character is not easily available, a direct HTML equivalent is the entity (em-space) which outputs the same fullwidth " " glyph.
A fullwidth space may be used where a colon or comma would be used in English: 大和銀行 大阪支店 (Yamato Bank, Osaka Branch).
[3] The colon (コロン, koron) consists of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line.
As a rule, a colon informs the reader that what follows proves, clarifies, explains, or simply enumerates elements of what is referred to before.
The exclamation point or mark (感嘆符, kantanfu), also colloquially called the びっくりマーク (bikkuri māku, lit.
While there is no exclamation point in formal Japanese, it is very commonly used, especially in casual writing, fiction and manga.
1 . 3 spaces before the title.
2 . 1 space between the author's family name and given name; 1 space below.
3 . Each new paragraph begins after a space.
4 . Subheadings have 1 empty line before and after, and have 2 spaces above.
5 . Punctuation marks normally occupy their own square, except when they occur at the bottom of a line, in which case they share a square with the last character of the line.
