When people talk about Japanese emoticons they usually use words like kaomoji, emoji or just Japanese emoticons to describe them but what’s the difference and what do these words mean? “Japanese Emoticons” is a pretty broad term and doesn’t really mean anything.  Both kaomoji and emoji are Japanese emoticons since they’re both different types of emoticons that came from Japan.  

Emoji

Emoji are small 12×12 pixel pictures that are used in messages in Japan.  Many Japanese phones and software have emoji built into them. They were invented in 1998 or 1999 (Wikipedia isn’t sure of the exact date… >_>) by Shigetaka Kurita. The word emoji literally means “picture letter”. Emoji have been standardized across all devices and some have even been incorporated into Unicode and can be used in places that don’t technically support emoji. Because of the Unicode standardization it’s possible to use them on iPhones or other cellphones that don’t have a Japanese carrier. You can even find emoji built into systems such as Gmail and even Apple’s Mac OSX operating system. Emoji are very Japanese, you’ll find emoticons for Japanese foods like dango, onigiri, curry or cultural things such as a traditional looking Japanese couple or a guy bowing in apology.  Here’s a screenshot of all the default emoji emoticons:  

Kaomoji

Kaomoji on the other hand is probably what most people think of when they hear Japanese emoticons. Kaomoji are the emoticons created using Japanese and other 2-byte characters that English keyboards don’t easily have access to. Kaomoji literally means “face mark” and are purely made out of text characters albeit fancier text characters than we can really type with an English keyboard. The emoticons that you’ll find on this website and app are all kaomoji emoticons.  

Gettin’ Crazy! ＼(☆o◎)／

Now if you really want to get crazy and you’re on a device that supports both text and emoji you can combine kaomoji emoticons with emoji emoticons to make some somewhat cool looking emoticons like these: This website apparently doesn’t support emoji so I had to screenshot those emoticons…  I don’t really seem to be overly creative right now either so those examples kind of suck. And now you know the difference between emoji and kaomoji Japanese emoticons!