Japanese punctuation

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Japanese punctuation" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Japanese writing
Components
Kanji Stroke order Radicals Jōyō kanji list Kyōiku kanji Tōyō kanji Jinmeiyō kanji Hyōgai kanji
Kana Hiragana Hentaigana Katakana Man'yōgana Sōgana Gojūon
Typographic symbols Japanese punctuation Iteration mark
Uses
Syllabograms Furigana Okurigana Braille
Transliteration
Rōmaji Hepburn Kunrei-shiki / ISO 3602 Nihon-shiki JSL Wāpuro (keyboard input)
Cyrillization Polivanov system
v t e

Japanese punctuation (Japanese: 約物, Hepburn: yakumono) includes various written marks (besides characters and numbers), which differ from those found in European languages, as well as some not used in formal Japanese writing but frequently found in more casual writing, such as exclamation and question marks.

Japanese can be written horizontally or vertically, and some punctuation marks adapt to this change in direction. Parentheses, curved brackets, square quotation marks, ellipses, dashes, and swung dashes are rotated clockwise 90° when used in vertical text (see diagram).

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.^[1]