2 years ago I came back to Japan after attending school in the US for a while. Whilst trying to settle down again in Japan, one of the first things I did was get my own cell phone, and I went about sending lots of e-mails to my old friends saying “I am back!”. But when I got their replies, I was shocked at how much I couldn’t understand of what they were saying. I could guess ^-^ as a smile, and (T_T) as a crying. But what the hell does this “orz” mean??? One of my friends later explained to me, “Oh, o is the head, and can’t you see this guy is on his knees? it means I’m disappointed, like I’ve fallen to my knees in despair!” That was the exact moment when I realized I had become old.
Written by Kyoko.
I’ve seen smilies (or emoticons) even in the US, such as 
or 
. But my Japanese friends showed me a world of Japanese emoticons that outnumbered my whole emoticon exposure in the US in only a week….using Japanese versions called “Kaomoji” (meaning face character).
Including emoticons, these text arts are more often called ASCII art. Roughly speaking, ASCII art is a graphic you create by using one line or several lines of text. Originally, it was used in environments where transmission of graphical content was impossible. However, it has been developed into a fun “retro” way of making images out of limited resources.
When I look at overseas sites, I often comes across more naturalistic ASCII art by either using specialized programs or depicting images somewhat precisely using mainly lines. However, many western ASCII art related websites stopped updating before or aound 2000. In Japan, there is still an on-going trend of ASCII art in very unique ways.
First of all, Japanese style ASCII art used not only one-byte characters but also two-byte characters. (Precisely, ASCII art use only 95 printable characters. Therefore, Japanese ASCII art is not exactly “ASCII” art. However many people still call it ASCII art or simply text art.)
And secondly, most of western ASCII art used only fixed-width fonts, Japanese uses proportional fonts to create more details.
The Japanese ASCII art has been helped along in a huge way by the massive internet forum, 2channel.
Text based communication such as blogs, chat and e-mail are the places original ways of communication have been born. In order to create a tone of voice or communicate quickly, abbreviation and copy and paste are often used. So if you don’t belong to that community, sometimes it can be hard to follow. (When I first saw, “lol” on an English message board, I didn’t quite understand what it was). In case of 2channel, their way of communication is evolving constantly and very quickly. And ASCII arts are commonly used elements. There are even posts entirely dedicated to ASCII arts. There are the story based ASCII arts posts, how to be ASCII art creators posts, and of course ASCII arts galleries.
Even you don’t create your own ASCII arts, you copy them and modify them.By coping and pasting and arranging, ASCII arts are developed very freely. But recently, the issue of copyright of these digital drawings has started to be discussed.
In Japan ASCII art is still a hot topic to talk about and will be for a long time to come. Last year, Beck made a music video incorporating ASCII art. I wonder if it will be big in western countries again. Or how about non-roman alphabet countries?
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