Fullwidth Left Curly Bracket

Try the shifted brace key with Japanese input on; the mapping varies.

A 2020 community support thread records one Japanese IME producing fullwidth braces, while another setup offered other bracket forms.

Does ｛ mean something different from {?

It opens the same pair; the difference is width and encoding.

Fullwidth punctuation developed for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text laid out in character-width cells: an ideograph filled a square cell, while ASCII punctuation was narrower. JIS X 0208, a Japanese character-encoding standard, was first established in 1978. Unicode’s fullwidth counterparts preserve that spacing when these scripts mix with ASCII.

Japanese print choices vary by genre, page layout, and typesetting; Chinese layout guidance also lists fullwidth braces as bracket punctuation.

Should I use ｛ in Japanese prose?

Usually not in Japanese prose; keep it for source or technical syntax.

A Japanese translation style guide advises against curly braces in ordinary Japanese prose unless they preserve the source format. Keep them when code or structured data requires them; for quotations, follow the document’s Japanese corner-bracket convention.