Japanese Nonograms

Where the name comes from

The puzzle was invented twice, independently, in Japan in 1987. Non Ishida won a Tokyo window-art competition with images made from lit and unlit windows on a skyscraper, and Tetsuya Nishio devised the same grid puzzle separately. Japanese magazines carried them long before the rest of the world did, which is why English speakers picked up the label "Japanese crossword".

The name is slightly misleading: nothing about the puzzle involves words or Japanese characters. The numbers beside each row and column describe runs of filled cells, and that logic is identical in every language.

What Japanese players call it

In Japan the puzzle is usually called お絵かきロジック (oekaki logic, roughly "drawing logic") or イラストロジック (illust logic). ピクロス (Picross) is Nintendo's brand name, which became the common term for the video-game form after Mario's Picross shipped for the Game Boy in 1995.

Elsewhere the same puzzle travels under griddlers, hanjie, paint by numbers, pic-a-pix and crucipixel. If you have solved any one of them, you already know the rules for all the rest.

The Japan-themed set

The boards below are the ones drawn from Japanese motifs — torii gates, sakura, lanterns, Mount Fuji, koi and kanji-inspired shapes. They are ordinary nonograms; the theme is in the picture that appears when the grid is finished, not in the rules.