Shift JIS art

An example of American Shift_JIS art.
Giko Neko (ギコネコ, gikoneko) Posted on the BBS HONTEN(HIRU NO BU) (本店（昼の部）, honten(hirunobu)) in 1998.

Shift_JIS art is artwork created from characters within the Shift JIS character set, a Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) superset of ASCII intended for Japanese usage. Naturally there are many similarities between Shift_JIS artwork and ASCII art.

Shift_JIS has become very popular on web-based bulletin boards, notably 2channel, and has even made its way into mainstream media and commercial advertising in Japan.

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.

Unlike Western ASCII art, which is generally designed to be viewed with a monospaced font, Shift_JIS art is designed around the proportional-width (albeit CJK characters are always the same 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.

In Japanese media

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.

See also

Further reading

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