Japanese symbols and kanji with meanings

Japanese and Chinese text uses its own full-width punctuation, which fills a square cell like a kanji does:

Symbol	Use
「 」	Japanese quotation marks
『 』	Quotes inside quotes, and titles of books or films
【 】	Headings and labels, e.g. in news or product titles
《 》 〈 〉	Book and article titles, especially in Chinese
、	Comma
。	Period (full stop)
・	Middle dot, separates words written in katakana, such as foreign names
ー	Long vowel mark in katakana: コーヒー (kōhī, coffee)
〜	Wave dash: ranges (10〜20) or a playful drawn-out sound
々	Repeats the previous kanji: 人々 (hitobito, people), 時々 (tokidoki, sometimes)
※	Reference mark, introduces a note
〒	Japanese postal mark, written before a ZIP code

Outside Japanese text, 「」 and 【】 are popular as decorative brackets around a name or a heading.

Kanji	Meaning	Japanese reading
愛	love	ai
心	heart, mind	kokoro
夢	dream	yume
力	power, strength	chikara
和	peace, harmony; also Japanese style	wa
美	beauty	bi
光	light	hikari
侍	samurai	samurai
忍	endure; the nin in ninja	nin, shinobu
龍	dragon	ryū, tatsu

Three characters on the page are mainly Chinese customs: 福 (fú, good fortune) is hung on doors at Lunar New Year, sometimes upside down because “fortune upside down” sounds like “fortune arrives” in Mandarin. 喜 means joy, and 囍, double happiness, decorates Chinese weddings. 龍 is the traditional form of dragon; mainland China writes 龙 and modern Japanese often uses 竜.

木 wood, 火 fire, 土 earth, 金 metal (also gold) and 水 water are the five elements of Chinese philosophy. Japanese uses the same characters, together with 日 sun and 月 moon, to name the days of the week:

• 日曜日 Sunday, 月曜日 Monday, 火曜日 Tuesday
• 水曜日 Wednesday, 木曜日 Thursday, 金曜日 Friday, 土曜日 Saturday

The Japanese Buddhist tradition of five elements (godai) is a different set: earth, water, fire, wind and void. So if you're designing something around “the five elements”, decide which tradition you mean first. The page also has 山 mountain and 人 person, two of the simplest and most recognizable kanji.

A single character can have several meanings, and its sense often depends on the words around it. A few precautions save a lot of regret:

• Ask a native speaker to check the character, its meaning and how it reads in context before it goes on skin, a shirt or a sign.
• Japanese and Chinese differ. The same character is pronounced differently (愛 is ai in Japanese, ài in Mandarin), and some characters are written differently: simplified Chinese writes love as 爱.
• Fonts matter. Japanese and Chinese fonts can draw the same code point with slightly different strokes. Choose a font made for the language you mean.
• Check the stroke order and proportions if you're tracing the character by hand; a printout from a good font is safer than a screenshot.

Some Japanese letters double as tiny faces in Western bios: ツ (tsu) and シ (shi) look like smiles, and ノ (no) serves as a waving arm in text faces. The page also includes the Japanese button emoji: 🈁 here, 🉐 bargain, ㊗ congratulations and ㊙ secret, plus 円 (yen) and 元 (yuan).

To type Japanese yourself, add a Japanese keyboard (input method) in your phone or computer settings; you type the reading in Latin letters and pick the kanji. For a few characters, copying is quicker: click one here and it's on your clipboard. In Word, type a code such as 611B and press Alt + X to get 愛. The detail panel shows each character's official Unicode name, code point and HTML code.