[astrange]

That can be useful if you feel Unicode doesn't represent what you want to say - for instance, if you can only communicate in ASCII symbols you can't invent any new symbols, you can "only" build them out of ASCII art.

It's mostly because Japan is bad at web technology and APIs though. They also love gratuitous complexity; you've seen their websites and how every page is covered in stuff, but the URLs themselves are less like "youtube.com" and more like "blahblahblah.bsd.unix.nicovideo.jp/several/tech/buzzwords.jsp".