japanese emoticons

Advanced Japanese Emoticons Infographic

May 11, 2015 By Peter

I’ve seen the following graphic shared a lot on the Internet over the years.

As all of you are no doubt aware though Japanese emoticons have become a lot more detailed and crazy. These are simple, “entry level” Japanese emoticons and since this graphic was created people have created tons of awesome, more advanced kaomoji emoticons. So I decided to create my own sort of infographic to sort of highlight how advanced Japanese emoticons have become. I call it, “advanced Japanese emoticons”.

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and it features some of my all-time favourite kaomojis. Hopefully this will help people to realize how far Japanese emoticons have become and help advertise the site a bit. Feel free to download this image and share it wherever you want! You can click on the image to get the full resolution version.

The Japanese Emoticons Android App is Finally Here!

April 13, 2014 By Peter

Well it took way longer than I originally planned and a ton of stuff went wrong during the process but the Japanese Emoticons Android app is finally finished and available for download on Google Play! I ended up having to hire a second developer to help me finish and submit everything but everything is good now and I’m quite excited that this app is finally available. Making an Android app I’ve now learned is pretty different from making an iOS app so the Android app doesn’t match the iOS one 100% but it’s really close. So click the link below to download the app and enjoy and a final note please leave a 5-star review. That is the absolute best way to show your support. The more good reviews the app gets the better chance it has of people finding it.

Click Here to Download the App

Awesome Secret Google Translate Japanese Emoticon Easter Egg

February 21, 2014 By Peter

@hyunjin9095 on Twitter recently pointed out an awesome Easter egg with Google Translate where if you type the names of Japanese animals in you’ll see kaomoji emoticons. To trigger this Easter egg first go to translate.google.com and select from Japanese to English.

Google Translate Japanese Emoticons Easter Egg

Then start typing the name of a Japanese animal into the box. If you just type in Romaji (English letters) it should automatically convert the syllables to Hiragana. If that doesn’t happen then click on the button at the bottom with the Hiragana character for a: あ.

Once you type the Japanese word, in this case I typed neko, the Japanese word for cat, hit the down arrow on your keyboard. This would normally give you different Kanji, Katakana and what not for the syllables you entered but in some cases, like neko, it’ll give you Japanese emoticons!

There are a bunch of different animals that Google Translate will give kaomoji for: Cat: neko Dog: inu Koala: koara Snake: hebi Bird: tori Fish: sakana

Some animals though like rabbit (usagi) don’t bring up any emoticons. I tried typing in some emotions too like happy (ureshii) and sad (kanashii) and it didn’t really give me anything. Typing kanashii did give me some Western emoticons like :( and :-( though… So I don’t know, it only really seems to work with animals but the word sad did give a couple other emoticons so I bet there are other words you can type in that will show other kaomoji emoticons too! It’s nice to see kaomoji emoticons getting out there in more and more places. If you find anything else hidden in Google Translate please share it in the comments.

Japanese Emoticons version 2.0 for iOS is now available!

December 25, 2013 By Peter

The latest version of our iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch app was approved late last night and is now available for download in the iTunes app store! This new version features a brand new design for iOS7 plus all the emoticons currently on this site are now in the app. In total we added about 1,500 new emoticons and 23 new categories to the app. We also fixed a few bugs so the app should run a lot smoother now. So if you haven’t downloaded the app yet head on over to the iTunes store and download it now! One word of warning to the people who are updating though, we had to completely redo the database of emoticons so when you update you will lose everything that’s currently saved in your favourites menu. Because of the fixes we made to the app though, this won’t happen again in future updates and we’re sorry for any inconvenience this might cause.

What about Android?

I’m pleased to announce that work has started on the Android version of the app. Not a lot is happening right now because of the holidays but stay tuned because an Android version of the new updated version of the app is in progress and should be out in a few weeks!

Other app news

We’re also in the progress of releasing a free ad-supported sort of demo version of both the iOS and Android versions of the app. This won’t have the full emoticon collection but it will give you the opportunity to test it out the app before buying it. The free iOS version will most likely be out before the Android version as it’s not going to require nearly as much work. And that’s it for news. Look forward to the Android version soon and have a safe and happy holidays everyone!

Emoji, Kaomoji and Japanese Emoticons, What’s the Difference Anyway?

November 23, 2013 By Peter

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!