Vertical left corner bracket

It opens a quotation in vertical East Asian writing.

Japanese uses corner brackets, called kagikakko, where English uses quotation marks: 「…」 frames speech, quoted words, titles or a term being singled out. Traditional Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong uses the same brackets as its quotation marks. When a novel, newspaper or manga is set in columns read top to bottom and right to left, the bracket turns: the opener becomes ﹁ above the quoted words and the closer ﹂ below them.

Corner brackets grew out of Japanese printing. In the eighteenth century, bracket-like marks set quoted or emphasised passages apart, while ioriten, marks that flagged the start of chanted parts in jōruri puppet-theatre texts, came to mark dialogue in late Edo fiction. With movable type in the early Meiji era the strands merged into the modern kagikakko.

Should I type ﹁ or 「?

Type 「; software turns it in vertical layout.

﹁ is a separate code point kept for compatibility with older East Asian character sets that stored vertical punctuation as its own characters. Modern word processors, e-book readers and web browsers rotate an ordinary 「 automatically in vertical mode. Text stored as ﹁ breaks searching, sorting and reflowing into horizontal lines, where it shows up sideways.