Vertical Left White Corner Bracket

It begins a double-corner quote pair.

Read ﹃…﹄ as an opening and closing quotation. In Japanese, the pair can mark an inner quote or a work title; its ordinary horizontal counterpart is 『…』. Chinese vertical text uses corner brackets where horizontal Chinese writing uses curved quotation marks, but Taiwan and Mainland conventions reverse the nesting order of 「」 and 『』.

How did Japanese corner brackets develop?

They developed through two older writing practices.

Japanese corner quotation marks, called kagikakko, developed from two strands. In the eighteenth century, one marked quoted or emphasized words. The other grew from the ioriten, a cue in scripts for jōruri, a Japanese sung drama; it marked sung verse and later dialogue in printed fiction. In the early Meiji period, movable type helped the strands merge into the familiar pair. Scholars differ on when the closing mark became regular.

Why does ﹃ look wrong after conversion?

It is a legacy form for vertical text.

Unicode recommends using 『 as the source character and letting vertical layout choose its display. Compatibility normalization, called NFKC, maps ﹃ to 『. A horizontal editor or conversion step may therefore show 『, while vertical layout can display the upright form.