Squared 前

Japanese TV listings, where it flags a programme's first part. On-screen program guides in Japan use tiny boxed characters as labels, the way some Western listings use icons: 🈑 (字) for subtitles, 🈞 (再) for a rerun, and 🈜 and 🈝 for the first and later parts of a programme split in two, the 前編 and 後編 (part one and part two) of a listing.

These labels come from ARIB STD-B24, the Japanese standard for digital broadcast data set in 1999, and Unicode encodes a selection of them, this one included, as ordinary text characters. The 前 inside is read mae on its own and zen in words like 前半 (zenhan, first half) and 前編 (zenpen, part one), where it carries the same idea as the box; in Mandarin it is qián.