Kaomojis (informative blog)

Definition 

To put simply, kaomojis are the japanese form of emoticons. Emoticons (short for emotion icon) are a “pictorial representation of facial expression using characters”. Kaomoji comes two words in Kanji; 顔 = face (kao) and 文字 = character (moji). 

Differences between emoticons

Emoticons usually focus on the mouth (ex; :3 :D :/) while kaomojis typically focus on the eyes. They’re also horizontal, unlike their vertical counterpart emoticons. Kaomojis are also not limited to emotions, as they can express actions, objects, and even stories. 

History

Kaomojis originated in the 1980s, similar to the beginnings of emoticons. Although, both started separately. Kaomojis arose mainly from ASCII NET, a Japanese publishing company. One of the most popular ones “(^_^)” was invented by Wakabayashi Yasushi in 1986. Anime culture has a lot of influence in kaomojis as well, such as with sweat drops in anime/manga similarly to how semicolons or apostrophes are used to indicate embarrassment. Anime forum posters started using kaomojis in the 2000s in Japan, thus causing more popularity in the Western crown (especially Americans). This caused more westernised kaomojis to come out, due to the differences in keyboards. 

Types of kaomojis

There are typical kaomojis that use parentheses (T_T) (x_x) (^^)

Some replace parentheses with braces or square brackets {^_^} [o_0]

Some get rid of parentheses all together ^-^ o_0 e_e

Shift JIS encoded characters (^ム^) (`Д´) (益)

Unicode in modern communication software (◕‿◕✿) (▰˘◡˘▰)

Unicode combining characters ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶ / (٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶)

Westernisation

This mainly came from English anime forums, adopting the kaomojis. A lot of Westerners refer to kaomojis as “anime style” emotions due to this. 

Some examples of westernised kaomojis are <(^_^<) and <('.'-^), inspired by Kirby. 

Parentheses are dropped in some versions of westernised kaomojis, and have extended mouths with underscores ^__________^

Some are different because of differences in cultures, such as t(-_-t) that uses the “t” as a middle finger, but has an Eastern style.

This wave of popularity has led to various western inspired kaomojis to form, such as *,..,* and <@>_____<@>;;

Sources

https://kaomoji.ru/en/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaomoji

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Corporation#History