If you're looking for fun and weird look no further than Japan. Ever. They have both markets covered. So it makes sense that their emoticons are even more fun and weird than ours. Get ready for Japanese emoticon fun.
\ (^_^) /
For those of you unfamiliar with what an emoticon is, it's this :) or this :( If you don't recognize these I'm sorry to inform you it's possible you might be dead. Or a cat, or a jar of mayonnaise. Whatever you are, you're not a living, walking, talking human because emoticons are EVERYWHERE.
Table of Contents
What's an emoticon?
An emoticon uses keyboard characters to represent faces and things. Emojis on the other hand are the more lifelike evolution of emoticons.
Here you see a happy face emoticon on the left and a happy face emoji on the right.
:) VS 🙂
So how did all of this start anyway?
History of the Emoticon
Date first used: September 19th, 1982 at 11:44 a.m.
Inventor: Dr. Scott Fahlman
Dr. Scott Fahlman a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, first proposed his new invention - the smiley face emoticon - in an email to colleagues after some computer messages joking about elevators crashing were interpreted as truth.
He decided that if this was how people were going to communicate online then they'd better come up with some way to identify certain sentences as jokes. They needed what he called a "joke marker". He and his colleagues toyed with various keyboard characters to represent a joke.
For days they looked down at their keyboards trying to determine WHICH keyboard character was the funniest. Was it the “%,” the “*,” or the “#” ? They also considered the ampersand, (&) since someone decided it looked like a "jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter." I'm not sure about you, but I do not see a jolly laughing man.
&
If anything I see a baby that just fell on its bum.
The debate was ended when Fahlman, computer nerd extraordinaire, sent this message:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:
:-(
message quote from Narratively
You can see that over the past 30 years we've shortened :-) to :). Because who has the time for a nose.
If you look at these things, :) :( from a sideways perspective as he points out, you can see that they represent a smiling face or a frowning face. Someone at some point became especially brilliant and invented the winking face ;) That's about as advanced as we've become in North America when it comes to emoticons.
:) :( ;)
You've got your happy, your sad and your i'm telling you the truth, but don't want you to be offended so I'll put this ambiguous wink here to soften the blow.
The sideways emoticon is NOT the way it's done in Japan. Japanese text emoticons are ready to read straight on.
No need to turn your phone, your head or your eyeballs sideways, which is especially important in Japan. In North America if you tip your head, become dizzy and stumble a bit, the scariest thing you'll fall into is the Grand Canyon. Do the same thing in Japan and you could fall into a Japanese hipster dressed up as a Hello Kitty Storm Trooper. Eek.
A lot of their emoticons are based on the Japanese keyboard, but there are a few that work with a regular North American keyboard.
Please enjoy the Japanese emoticon versions of angry, happy, surprised, tired, excited, dead and ... John Lennon. I know! What??? \_(*o*)_/
Copy & Paste Emoticons
How to Type Japanese Emoticons
(>_<)
Angry/frustrated - left bracket, underscore, less than, right bracket
(^_^)
Happy - left bracket, caret, underscore, caret, right bracket
( -_-)
Mellow - left bracket, space, hyphen, underscore, hyphen, right bracket
(°J°)
John Lennon - left bracket, degree sign, capital J, degree sign, right bracket
(o_o)
Surprised - left bracket, capital O, underscore, capital O, right bracket
(=J=)
Tired - left bracket, equal, capital J, equal, right bracket
(^_^) /
Yay! - backslash, space, left bracket, caret, underscore, caret, right bracket, space, forward slash
_(*o*)_/
Oh no/What? - backslash, underscore, left bracket, asterisk, small O, asterisk, right bracket, underscore, forward slash
(X_X)
Dead - left bracket, capital X, underscore, capital X, right bracket
(^._.^)~
Cat - left bracket, caret, period, underscore, period, caret, right bracket, squiggly
I know. I thought it was bizarre they had a John Lennon emoticon too. When exactly would you need to use that?
Wife: Hey honey. Could you pick up some of those things (°J°) sang about?
Husband: Huh??
Wife: Strawberries. Could you pick up strawberries?
So as you're texting, emailing, Instagramming, Facebooking or Tweeting at someone whip some of these out.
It's nice to use these more elaborate emoticons. It shows the recipient you think they're important enough to use more than a generic emoticon, just not important enough to use actual words.
Have a good weekend!
Who knew? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯