AA (Japanese ASCII art)

In a sense, AA is an extension of western ASCII art practice in Japan -- but not using the severely constrained printable characters of the ASCII character set, but rather the expansive options offered by the [Shift JIS] character set, encompassing Japanese hiragana, katakana, kanji, and a variety of symbols in addition to a complete set of Latin characters. With the vastly expanded palette of "brush" types, where western ASCII art practice can be considered an exercise in minimalist constraint, AA is often conversely a question of searching through an incredibly deep toolkit looking for the one character, the needle in the haystack, that constitutes a perfect fit for what you want to depict on the screen at that location.

Where western ASCII art is traditionally made using fixed-width (monospace) characters on an invisible textmode screen grid, AA is typically made using the Japanese Windows default proportional-width MS PGothic font (or its free counterpart, Mona), so other than both using text characters to draw illustrations on a screen, the particulars of character placement and composition techniques and strategies are very different.

AA practice emerged from the popular 2ch.net textboard. An AA illustrator plays a prominent role in the 2004 Densha Otoko series.