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Shift_JIS art is artwork created from characters in the Shift JIS character set, a superset of the ASCII encoding standard intended for Japanese usage. Shift_JIS art has become popular on web-based bulletin boards, notably 2channel, and has even made its way into mainstream media and commercial advertising in Japan.
The Shift JIS character set is a Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) superset of JIS X 0201 (in turn almost a superset of ASCII) intended for Japanese usage. Unlike Western ASCII art, which is generally designed to be viewed with a monospaced font, Shift_JIS art is designed around the proportional-width MS PGothic font supplied with Microsoft Windows, which is the default font for web sites in Japanese versions of Windows. This dependency has led to the development of the free Mona Font, in which each character is the same width as its counterpart in MS PGothic. This is useful on operating systems lacking the PGothic font, such as Linux.
Within the Japanese community, Shift_JIS art is sometimes abbreviated as SJIS art, but is most commonly referred to as "AA" meaning ASCII art, although it rarely restricts itself to the 95 printable characters within the ASCII standard. As with ANSI art, SJIS art is sometimes used for animation. However, due to technical advances, SJIS art also appears in the form of Adobe Flash files and animated GIFs.
The Japanese movie and television show, Densha Otoko (電車男), frequently included Shift_JIS art, both during screen transitions and within the story itself. One of the recurring characters in the TV series was a Shift_JIS artist who would often draw full-screen Shift_JIS works of art as a way of expressing his support and encouraging the lead character. When they got engaged, posts began flowing in congratulating the new couple, and extravagant Shift JIS art pictures were posted.
The Touhou Project meme "Yukkuri shiteitte ne!!!" traces back to Shift JIS art of Reimu Hakurei's outfit in Curiosities of Lotus Asia that was posted to 2channel's "Touhou Series General Thread" on December 5, 2003. The artwork was later edited and rendered to a head, which someone increased the size of on April 18, 2004, but it wasn't really noticed until someone started posting the artwork in the Japanese BBS rental board Shitaraba's Immaterial and Missing Power threads on May 28, 2007. [1] Of course, the head was made fun of, but a few weeks later, users started making edits or variations of the text-based head. [2] It's known what the Marisa head is based on, but it's unclear when the two Shift JIS art was combined or where the "Yukkuri shiteitte ne!!!" phrase was appended to the heads. [3] [ unreliable source ]
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters. The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font such as Courier for presentation.
2channel, also known as 2ch, Channel 2, and sometimes retrospectively as 2ch.net, was an anonymous Japanese textboard founded in 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura. Described in 2007 as "Japan's most popular online community", the site had a level of influence comparable to that of traditional mass media such as television, radio, and magazines. At the time, the site drew an annual revenue of around ¥100 million, and was the largest of its kind in the world, with around ten million visitors and 2.5 million posts made per day.
Hiroyuki Nishimura is a Japanese internet entrepreneur. He founded the message board 2channel, and is an administrator of 4chan. He is also a self-help author and TV personality. He is often known by his given name, hiroyuki (ひろゆき), which he uses, rendered intentionally in lowercase, both as a pen name and as a username.
Mona Font is both a Japanese proportional pixel font for the X Window System, derived from the Shinonome raster font family, and a TrueType font. It aims to represent Shift JIS art graphics properly, almost all of which require the MS PGothic font. Mona is named after Mona, a character-based mascot of 2channel.
In relation to the Japanese language and computers many adaptation issues arise, some unique to Japanese and others common to languages which have a very large number of characters. The number of characters needed in order to write in English is quite small, and thus it is possible to use only one byte (28=256 possible values) to encode each English character. However, the number of characters in Japanese is many more than 256 and thus cannot be encoded using a single byte - Japanese is thus encoded using two or more bytes, in a so-called "double byte" or "multi-byte" encoding. Problems that arise relate to transliteration and romanization, character encoding, and input of Japanese text.
In computing, JIS encoding refers to several Japanese Industrial Standards for encoding the Japanese language. Strictly speaking, the term means either:
Shift JIS is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by the Japanese company ASCII Corporation in conjunction with Microsoft and standardized as JIS X 0208 Appendix 1.
Extended Unix Code (EUC) is a multibyte character encoding system used primarily for Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese (characters).
GB/T 2312-1980 is a key official character set of the People's Republic of China, used for Simplified Chinese characters. GB2312 is the registered internet name for EUC-CN, which is its usual encoded form. GB refers to the Guobiao standards (国家标准), whereas the T suffix denotes a non-mandatory standard.
In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana are variant forms of hiragana.
Touhou Project, also known simply as Touhou, is a bullet hell shoot 'em up video game series created by independent Japanese doujin soft developer Team Shanghai Alice. The team's sole member, Jun'ya "ZUN" Ōta, has independently developed programming, graphics, writing, and music for the series, publishing 19 mainline games and 13 spin-offs since 1997. ZUN has also produced related print works and music albums, and collaborated with doujin developer Twilight Frontier on seven of the official spin-offs, six of which are fighting games.
JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969, was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. The character set was initially known as JIS C 6220 before the JIS category reform. Its two forms were a 7-bit encoding or an 8-bit encoding, although the 8-bit form was dominant until Unicode replaced it. The full name of this standard is 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets for information interchange (7ビット及び8ビットの情報交換用符号化文字集合).
Netrun-mon is a single-episode Japanese original video animation which was created to celebrate the fifth anniversary of NetRunner magazine. NetRunner is a controversial publication since some articles promote hacking. Characters that are used to promote the magazine and are sold as merchandise have been taken directly from Hiroyuki's 2channel community. Hiroyuki himself is a character of Netrun-mon, one of the many references to Internet fandom in Japan that the anime is based upon.
Soramimi is a Japanese word that in the context of contemporary Japanese internet meme culture and its related slang is commonly used to refer to humorous homophonic reinterpretation, deliberately interpreting words as other similar-sounding words for comedy.
Futaba Channel, or Futaba for short, also sometimes called 2chan, is a Japanese imageboard. Users of the website can upload pictures and discuss a wide variety of topics, from daily personal problems to sports, ramen, otaku and underground culture.
JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. The official title of the current standard is 7-bit and 8-bit double byte coded KANJI sets for information interchange. It was originally established as JIS C 6226 in 1978, and has been revised in 1983, 1990, and 1997. It is also called Code page 952 by IBM. The 1978 version is also called Code page 955 by IBM.
Pedobear is an Internet meme that became popular through the imageboard 4chan. As the name suggests, it is portrayed as a pedophilic cartoon bear. It is a concept used to mock child sex offenders or people who have any sexual interest in children or "jailbait". The bear image has been likened to bait used to lure children or as a mascot for pedophiles.
Accel World is a Japanese light novel series written by Reki Kawahara and illustrated by HIMA. It has been published by ASCII Media Works under its Dengeki Bunko imprint since February 2009. The series has spawned three manga series; Accel World by Hiroyuki Aigamo, published in Dengeki Bunko Magazine from April 2010 to June 2017; Acchel World by Ryuryū Akari, published in the same magazine from April 2010 to June 2016; and Accel World / Dural: Magisa Garden by Ayato Sasakura, published in Monthly Comic Dengeki Daioh from January 2012 to June 2017. The light novel series and its manga adaptation of the same name have been licensed for English release in North America by Yen Press.
Microsoft Windows code page 932, also called Windows-31J amongst other names, is the Microsoft Windows code page for the Japanese language, which is an extended variant of the Shift JIS Japanese character encoding. It contains standard 7-bit ASCII codes, and Japanese characters are indicated by the high bit of the first byte being set to 1. Some code points in this page require a second byte, so characters use either 8 or 16 bits for encoding.