Halfwidth Japanese comma

This form comes from early Japanese computer text. Japan’s compact JIS X 0201 set added Japanese syllabic characters (kana) and punctuation to computer text, including this comma, in 1969. Fixed-width displays gave these marks narrower cells than wider Japanese characters.

Japanese writing was lightly punctuated or unpunctuated before Western-style marks spread during Japan’s Meiji era (1868–1912). Scholars advocated commas in some school texts, and novelists helped establish punctuation from the mid-1880s. Japanese commas separate phrases or guide reading; placement is more flexible than English rules.