Reversed double prime quotation mark

It opens a quotation, like a Japanese “ that needs 〟 to close. Japanese has two native quote pairs, the corner brackets 「」 and 『』. For emphasis, or for a word used in a special sense, it also borrowed the Western double quotes “ ”. In vertical, top-to-bottom typesetting this pair takes over that job: 〝 hangs at the top-right corner of the quoted run and 〟 sits at its bottom-left.

The names explain the shape. ダブルミニュート, "double minute", is a Japanese-made name, and the mark does look like a doubled prime ″ (two little strokes); ノノカギ, "nono brackets", is because each half looks like two katakana ノ. Unicode's name says the same thing in its own way: a double prime drawn reversed, serving as a quotation mark.

You meet it mostly in vertical Japanese text, newspapers and books included. A word wrapped in 〝…〟 is being quoted, stressed or marked as so-called: 〝勝利〟 can read much like "victory" in English scare quotes. Horizontal Japanese more often uses 「」 or “ ”, so meeting 〝 in sideways text usually means the writer wanted a distinctive look or copied it from vertical text.

What does it mean when someone sends 〝?

They are quoting or stressing a word, or it is a stray half of a pair. A Japanese sender who writes 〝信用〟 is setting the word apart: stressing it, or using it in a special, so-called sense. If 〝 arrives alone, it is usually leftover punctuation, a wrong pick from the keyboard's suggestions, or the opening of a quote the sender never finished. It carries no emotion of its own.