The ultimate guide to understanding Japanese Kaomoji

In Japan hardly any email or IM message get written which doesn’t contain some form of smileys or emoticons.
While emoji (graphical presentations of emoticons) are probably most known, “kaomoji” (from “kao” = face, “moji” = character) are the Japanese version of Western emoticons and there are practically endless variations available. The biggest difference to the Western counterpart is probably that they are read horizontally and you don’t need to turn your head to understand them, for example the Western emoticon for “Happy” looks like this :-) while the Japanese version looks like this (^_^).

There are many stereotypes about how the Japanese convey emotions and feelings, the most popular one is probably “the Japanese show no emotion“, but in fact the rich culture of kaomoji shows just how different the perception between Westerners and Japanese is. To fill in this blank, lovely Ako and I decided to create the ultimate visual guide to Japanese kaomoji.