Shift_JIS art is artwork created from characters in the

Shift JIS Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjuncti ...

character set, a superset of the

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

encoding standard intended for Japanese usage. Shift_JIS art has become popular on web-based bulletin boards, notably

2channel , also known as 2ch, Channel 2, and sometimes retrospectively as 2ch.net, was an anonymous Japanese textboard founded in 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura. Described in 2007 as "Japan's most popular online community", the site had a level of influ ...

, and has even made its way into mainstream media and commercial advertising in

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

In Japanese media

The

character set is a

Japanese Industrial Standards are the standards used for industrial activities in Japan, coordinated by the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) and published by the Japanese Standards Association (JSA). The JISC is composed of many nationwide committees and pla ...

(JIS) superset of

JIS X 0201 JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969 (then called JIS C 6220 until the JIS category reform), was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. It is either a 7-bit encoding or an 8-bit encoding, altho ...

(in turn almost a superset of

) intended for Japanese usage. Unlike Western

ASCII art ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant char ...

, which is generally designed to be viewed with a

monospaced font A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spaci ...

, Shift_JIS art is designed around the proportional-width MS PGothic font supplied with

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

, which is the default font for web sites in Japanese versions of Windows. This dependency has led to the development of the free

Mona Font Mona Font is both a Japanese proportional pixel font for the X Window System, derived from the Shinonome raster font family, and a TrueType font. It aims to represent Shift JIS art graphics properly, almost all of which require the MS PGothic font ...

, in which each character is the same width as its counterpart in MS PGothic. This is useful on operating systems lacking the PGothic font, such as

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

. Within the Japanese community, Shift_JIS art is sometimes abbreviated as ''SJIS art'', but is most commonly referred to as "AA" meaning ASCII art, although it rarely restricts itself to the 95 printable characters within the ASCII standard. As with

ANSI art The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organi ...

, SJIS art is sometimes used for animation. However, due to technical advances, SJIS art also appears in the form of

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Flash ...

files and animated GIFs. The Japanese movie and television show, , frequently included Shift_JIS art, both during screen transitions and within the story itself. One of the recurring characters in the TV series was a Shift_JIS artist who would often draw full-screen Shift_JIS works of art as a way of expressing his support and encouraging the lead character. When they got engaged, posts began flowing in congratulating the new couple, and extravagant Shift JIS art pictures were posted. The ''

Touhou Project The , also known simply as , is a bullet hell shoot 'em up video game series created by one-man independent Japanese ''doujin'' soft developer Team Shanghai Alice. Since 1995, the team's member, Jun'ya "ZUN" Ōta, has independently developed ...

'' meme "Yukkuri shite itte ne!" comes from a Shift_JIS attempt to draw the lead characters of Touhou, Reimu and Marisa.

Gallery

File:Gikoneko_Image.svg, Posted on / in 1997 File:Gikoneko01.svg, Posted on in 1999 File:Mona01.svg, Posted on in 2000. File:Gikokuma.svg, Posted on in 2000. File:Kumakuma.svg, Posted on in 2003. Posted on in 2007 File:Anti2ch.svg, Anti2ch File:Go2ch.svg, 逝ってよし(ItteYoshi) means "you can die." It is Japanese slang. File:Yukarin1128.jpg, AA character goods The first consumer product with

dōjin In Japan, is a group of people who share an interest, activity, or hobby. The word is sometimes translated into English as " clique", "fandom", "coterie", "society", or "circle" (as in " sewing circle"). Self-published creative works produced ...

. File:2ch_goods.jpg, 2ch goods with

External links

A collection of Shift_JIS art at text-mode.tumblr.com
* {{cite web , url=http://www9.ocn.ne.jp/~wakan/Others/FaceMark.html , trans-title=Origin of the emoticon (^_^) , language=Japanese , title=顔文字の起源 (^_^) , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140727111507/http://www9.ocn.ne.jp/~wakan/Others/FaceMark.html , archive-date=2014-07-27
2ch.net AA Saloon
(in Japanese)
4-ch.net ASCII Art board

Japanese Ascii Art.image
Japanese art Internet culture 2channel ASCII art Fictional cats Articles with underscores in the title ja:アスキーアート#日本での使用

In Japanese media

Gallery

See also

Further reading

External links