Japanese Emoticons

Japanese emoticons (kaomoji) express emotion with text alone — happy ＼(^o^)／, shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ, table flip (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻. Browse by category, search, or build your own below.

Kaomoji aren't a font or a Unicode category of their own — they're built by combining characters from several unrelated Unicode blocks, which is exactly why some render better than others depending on the device:

The kaomoji library is sorted into moods so you can copy the right one fast:

The first Western emoticon, :-), was proposed by Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon in 1982. Japanese kaomoji emerged separately on Japanese PC networks in the 1980s, and were designed to be read upright rather than rotated — which is why faces like (^_^) put the eyes and mouth in natural positions. The style later exploded on Japanese message boards such as 2channel, where users built elaborate text faces and full ASCII-art scenes. Full details, with cited dates, are on the shrug emoji history page and the what is a kaomoji guide.

Kaomoji's international spread wasn't a single event but a gradual absorption process, mirroring how Japanese pop culture more broadly (anime, manga, gaming) moved into English-language internet spaces through the 1990s and 2000s. Early adoption clustered around communities already engaged with Japanese media — anime forums, early gaming communities, IRC channels frequented by people with some exposure to Japanese internet culture. From there, individual kaomoji (particularly the shrug, and later the Lenny face, which is a Western reinterpretation of the same 'text face' idea rather than a direct Japanese import) crossed over into mainstream use on platforms like Reddit and Twitter, stripped of most of their original cultural context but keeping their visual logic intact.

Once you understand the basic anatomy — arms or brackets on the outside, eyes and a mouth in the middle — you can remix existing kaomoji rather than only copying from a fixed list. Swap the eyes (^ ^ for closed-happy, T T for crying, ⊙ ⊙ for wide-surprised) while keeping the same outer structure, and you get a recognizably related but distinct new face. This compositional flexibility is a big part of why the kaomoji vocabulary kept expanding for decades without any central authority curating it — unlike emoji, which require a formal Unicode proposal to add anything new, anyone can invent a kaomoji simply by rearranging existing characters.

Outside Japan, copy-paste (or the grid on this page) is the practical way to use kaomoji, because no mainstream keyboard layout maps their characters to physical keys. Inside Japan, the situation is different: the standard Japanese input method editors (IMEs) — Microsoft IME, Google Japanese Input, and ATOK — ship with a built-in kaomoji dictionary. Typing the phonetic reading of a word like kao (顔, 'face') or warai (笑い, 'laugh') during Japanese text conversion surfaces a scrollable list of matching kaomoji as a conversion candidate, the same way typing an English word offers autocomplete suggestions. This is why kaomoji remain in everyday casual use across Japanese social media and messaging apps: for a Japanese-language typist, producing (＾▽＾) or ٩(◕‿◕)۶ takes the same few keystrokes as typing an ordinary word, not a special lookup. It's also part of why the style has stayed so prolific — an IME with thousands of cataloged kaomoji makes inventing and rediscovering variants effectively frictionless for native users, while the rest of the world discovers and reuses only the handful of faces that go viral enough to spread through screenshots and copy-paste tools like this one.