Japanese Punctuation & Quotation Marks | Names and Uses

For seventy years, the Japanese government did not use the Japanese comma. A 1952 style guide for official documents, 公用文作成こうようぶんさくせいの要領ようりょう, told civil servants that horizontal text should be punctuated with the Western comma 「，」 and the Japanese full stop 「。」. So for decades a ministry report could look like this: 本日，会議を行います。 Newspapers, novels and schoolbooks used the ordinary 「、」 the whole time, and the two styles sat side by side.

The rule only changed in January 2022, when the Agency for Cultural Affairs published new guidance, 公用文作成こうようぶんさくせいの考かんがえ方かた, and made 「、」 the standard for government writing too.

That small story says a lot about Japanese punctuation. Most of it was borrowed or invented in the last 150 years, the rules are softer than English rules, and the marks a learner meets in a textbook are not quite the ones they meet on a phone screen. Classical Japanese was written with no punctuation at all. The marks you see today were standardised around the Meiji era, and some, like 「？」 and 「！」, only became normal in everyday writing within living memory.

This guide covers every mark you will meet as a learner: what it is called in Japanese, what it does, where it differs from English, and how to type it on a computer and a phone.

Table of Contents

• Japanese Punctuation at a Glance
• The Full Stop and the Comma: Maru and Ten
• Japanese Quotation Marks: 「」 and 『』
• The Other Brackets
• Marks Inside Words: ・ ー and 々
• The Wave Dash 〜 and the Ellipsis …
• Question Marks and Exclamation Marks
• Symbols You Will See Everywhere
• Spaces, Width and Vertical Text
• How to Type Japanese Punctuation
• Punctuation in Texts and Chat

Japanese Punctuation at a Glance

Here is every mark in this guide in one table. The Japanese names are the ones you would use if you asked a Japanese friend "what is this called?", and they are also what you type to find the mark on a keyboard, which matters later.

Two names are worth learning first, because you will hear them all the time: 句読点くとうてん is the word for punctuation in general (literally "full stop and comma marks"), and かっこ is the word for any kind of bracket.

The Full Stop and the Comma: Maru and Ten

The 「。」 is called 句点くてん in a grammar book and まる in conversation, because it is a little circle. It ends a sentence, exactly like an English full stop:

明日あしたは雨あめです。
It will rain tomorrow.

The 「、」 is 読点とうてん, or simply てん. It marks a pause inside a sentence. This is where Japanese feels freer than English. There is no strict rule like "a comma before a coordinating conjunction". Writers place 、 where a reader would naturally take a breath, or where it removes ambiguity.

Ambiguity is the real job. Because Japanese has no spaces between words, a 、 can change which word a phrase attaches to. Compare:

私わたしは泣なきながら走はしる彼かれを追おいかけた。
私は泣きながら、走る彼を追いかけた。

The first sentence leaves it open who is crying. In the second, the comma after 泣きながら ties the crying to 私: I was crying as I chased him while he ran. The words are identical. Only the comma moved.

A few habits cover most real writing:

• Put 、 after a long topic or subject: 昨日きのう駅えきで会あった人ひとは、先生せんせいでした。
• Put 、 after a connecting word at the start of a sentence: でも、しかし、だから、それから.
• Put 、 after a clause ending in て, けど, から or が when the sentence carries on: 疲つかれたから、帰かえります。
• Do not put 、 between a word and its particle, and do not use one where English would put a comma in a date or a number. ２０２６年１０月１５日 has no commas.

If you want to see where a sentence naturally breaks into chunks, paste it into the Japanese sentence analyzer. It splits a sentence into its parts and particles, which is a quick way to see why a writer put the comma where they did. The bigger picture of how those chunks are ordered is in our guide to Japanese sentence structure.

Japanese Quotation Marks: 「」 and 『』

Japanese does not normally use “ ” or " " in running text. It uses corner brackets, called かぎかっこ, because each one is shaped like a hook (鍵かぎ).

「」 does three jobs:

1. Dialogue. Every line of speech in a novel or manga caption sits inside 「」: 「おはよう」と母ははが言いった。 "Good morning," my mother said.
2. Quoting words or thoughts. 彼かれは「無理むりだ」と思おもった。 He thought, "It's impossible."
3. Highlighting a word, the way English uses quotation marks or italics: 「甘あまえ」という言葉ことば. The word "amae".

The grammar that goes with quoting, the particle と plus 言う or 思う, has its own page: quoting with と. The marks and the grammar work together. 「」 shows the exact words; と links them to the verb.

『』, the double corner brackets, have two uses. The first is a quote inside a quote, just as English switches from double to single quotation marks:

先生せんせいは「宿題しゅくだいに『未来みらい』という題だいで書かいてください」と言いった。

The second is titles of books, films, albums and games, where English uses italics: 『ノルウェイの森もり』, 『千せんと千尋ちひろの神隠かみかくし』. Shorter works, like a song or a chapter, often go in 「」 instead.

Does the 。 go inside the brackets?

This is the question learners ask most, and the honest answer is that both styles exist. The Ministry of Education's 1946 guide to punctuation put the full stop inside the closing bracket, and Japanese elementary school textbooks still do: 「いってきます。」. Most novels, newspapers and websites drop it: 「いってきます」. What almost nobody does is put the 。 after the bracket when the quote stands alone as its own line.

When the quote sits inside a longer sentence, the full stop goes at the end of the whole sentence, after と言った or と思った, never inside the bracket:

「すぐ行いきます」と答こたえた。

For your own writing, drop the 。 before 」. It is what you will read most, and it is never wrong outside a school worksheet.

The Other Brackets

Japanese has more bracket shapes than English, and each one carries a small signal.

【】 is the one you will notice first. Open any Japanese news site or YouTube and titles begin with a label in lenticular brackets: 【速報そくほう】 for breaking news, 【公式こうしき】 for an official channel, 【初心者向しょしんしゃむけ】 for a beginner video. Online shops use them the same way, with 【送料無料そうりょうむりょう】 (free shipping) at the front of a product name.

《》 has a lovely niche use. Aozora Bunko, the free library of Japanese classics, stores its books as plain text, so it cannot draw furigana above a word. Instead it writes the reading in double angle brackets straight after the kanji: 吾輩わがはい《わがはい》は猫ねこである. Web novel sites use the same trick, and their readers turn it back into furigana on screen.

Marks Inside Words: ・ ー and 々

Three marks live inside words rather than between them, and they cause more confusion than all the brackets put together.

・ the middle dot (中黒). Japanese has no spaces, so when a foreign name has several parts, katakana needs a way to show where one ends: マーティン・ルーサー・キング, レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ. It also lists short parallel items, the way English uses a slash or "and": 東京とうきょう・大阪おおさか・名古屋なごや.

ー the long vowel mark (長音符). In katakana, a long vowel is written with a bar instead of a second vowel: コーヒー (coffee), ケーキ (cake), スーパー (supermarket). In horizontal text it is a horizontal line; in vertical text it turns into a vertical one. Learners often confuse it with the kanji 一いち (one) and with a hyphen. They look nearly identical in many fonts, but they are three different characters, and a search engine treats them differently. If you are drilling katakana, our katakana chart shows where ー fits.

々 the repeat mark (踊り字). 々 means "repeat the kanji before me": 人々ひとびと (people), 時々ときどき (sometimes), 色々いろいろ (various), 日々ひび (day by day). It is not a kanji and has no reading of its own. It simply takes on the reading of the repeated word, which often changes with rendaku, as in ひと becoming びと. Japanese people sometimes call it ノマ, because it looks like the katakana ノ and マ squeezed together. Older texts also use ゝ and ゞ to repeat hiragana, and you will still see them in shop names.

If a word with 々 trips you up when reading, the kanji to hiragana converter gives you the reading of the whole word, repeat mark included.

The Wave Dash 〜 and the Ellipsis …

〜 the wave dash (波ダッシュ) has three common uses.

The first is ranges, where English uses a hyphen or "to": 営業時間えいぎょうじかん 10時じ〜18時じ (open 10 to 6), 月げつ〜金きん (Monday to Friday). The second is "from", on menus and signs: 500円えん〜 means "from 500 yen". The third is casual: a drawn-out vowel at the end of a word, like そうだね〜 or ありがと〜, which reads as warm and relaxed, a bit like stretching "sooo" in English. Grammar books also use 〜 as a blank to show where a word goes, as in 〜たい or 〜ている.

… the ellipsis (三点リーダー). Japanese writers normally use two of them together, ……, making six dots instead of three. A single … looks clipped in a Japanese novel. The ellipsis shows trailing off, hesitation or a silence that is itself the reply. In manga, a speech bubble containing only …… is a character saying nothing, pointedly.

Question Marks and Exclamation Marks

Formal Japanese does not need a question mark. The particle か already marks a question, so a polite question simply ends in か。:

どこに行いきますか。

That is still how many official documents, exam papers and older books write questions. The 「？」 became common later, and now appears freely in everyday writing, signs and anything casual. In casual speech, where か often disappears, the question mark is what tells you it is a question at all:

どこ行いくの？
大丈夫だいじょうぶ？

The 「！」 works like English, but manga and texting use it far more freely, and you will often see the two stacked together as ！？ for surprise. Japanese people call the exclamation mark びっくりマーク ("surprise mark") and the question mark はてなマーク, from はてな, an old word for "I wonder".

One quiet rule: a full-width ？ or ！ in the middle of a passage is usually followed by a full-width space before the next sentence starts, while 。 never is. You will see this in novels and careful writing.

Symbols You Will See Everywhere

These are not punctuation in the strict sense, but you cannot read a menu, a form or a train notice without them.

○ and × are the ones that catch learners out. In Japan, a circle means correct and a cross means wrong, so a test marked with circles is good news. On a form, ○ next to an option often means "this one", and you may be asked to ○をつけてください (circle it), not tick it. A tick ✓ can even read as "wrong" to some Japanese teachers, which surprises a lot of people sitting their first exam in Japan.

Spaces, Width and Vertical Text

Three layout rules make Japanese text look the way it does.

No spaces between words. Japanese is written as a continuous string, and the mix of kanji, hiragana and katakana does the job spaces do in English. The exception is text written only in kana, which uses spaces so it can be read: children's picture books, and older Nintendo games such as the original Pokémon, where the screen could not show kanji. This style is called 分わかち書がき. If you are still reading slowly through all-hiragana text, the hiragana chart and the kana quiz are the fastest way to speed up.

Full width. Japanese punctuation takes up a full square, the same space as a kanji. 。 and 、 sit in the lower left of their square in horizontal text, and ！？ are full-width too. If you type English punctuation into Japanese text by accident (a half-width "!" or ","), it looks cramped and wrong to a Japanese reader, rather like a full-width ！ in an English email.

Vertical text. Novels, newspapers and most manga are still written top to bottom, right to left. In vertical text, 。 and 、 move to the upper right of their square, ー turns vertical, and brackets rotate: 「」 become hooks at the top and bottom of the quote. Nothing about the meaning changes, but the first page of a vertical novel can look odd until you have seen it a few times. Our guide to starting with easy Japanese reading has material at every level if you want the practice.

How to Type Japanese Punctuation

Once you switch on a Japanese keyboard, most punctuation is on keys you already know. On a computer with the Japanese input turned on, using a standard US layout:

Layouts and input apps differ a little, so if one key gives you something else, use the second method, which works on every Japanese keyboard: type the name of the mark in hiragana and convert it with the space bar.

• かっこ converts to every bracket: 「」『』（）【】〈〉《》
• やじるし gives arrows: → ← ↑ ↓
• こめ gives ※
• から gives 〜
• まる gives ○ and ●, and ばつ gives ×
• ゆうびん gives 〒
• てん lists many dots, including ・ and …
• おなじ or どう gives 々 on most systems

On an iPhone with the Japanese kana keyboard (the flick one), the key labelled 、。?! holds the four basics: tap for 、, and flick for 。, ？ and ！. Brackets live on the や key: flick left for 「 and right for 」. On the Japanese romaji keyboard, 、 and 。 sit on the bottom row. The type-and-convert method works on the phone too.

Punctuation in Texts and Chat

Everything above describes written Japanese. Chat is different, and the difference made national news.

In early 2024, Japanese TV and newspapers ran stories about マルハラ, short for "maru harassment". The idea was that ending a LINE message with 。 reads as cold, angry or bossy to many younger people, so a manager who writes 了解りょうかいしました。 can sound like they are annoyed. Whether you find the word silly or not, the habit behind it is real. In casual chat, most people leave the full stop off and end with nothing, a ！, a 〜, a 笑 (short for 笑わらい, laughter), a w, or an emoji.

The rule of thumb is simple. Use 。 and 、 properly in anything formal: email, school work, a job application, an essay. In chat with friends, follow their lead, and drop the 。 if they do. That split between formal and casual runs through all of Japanese, and our Japanese sentence analyzer is a handy check when you are not sure whether a sentence you have written is the polite version or the plain one.

If you want to practise this in real conversation, the Benkyou Mashou app gives you daily speaking practice, AI conversations, flashcards and short lessons, so the Japanese you read on the page becomes Japanese you can say.

Punctuation is one of the few parts of Japanese you can learn in an afternoon. Learn the names, learn the two keyboard tricks, and the next time you see 【】 at the start of a headline or a lone …… in a speech bubble, you will know exactly what the writer meant.