and 
. more about original emoticons >>>
KAO-MOJI or KAO-MAAKU or
JAPANESE EMOTICONS
author: Jana Nikolić
January 2005
translation into English: Danijela Tomazović
November 2009
kao (jap.) face; moji (jap. moji) character
kao -maaku=face mark (Japanese pronounce English word “mark” as “maaku”)
emoticon=emotion+icon
Emoticon is a group of ASCII characters which represents human face and expresses some emotion. Emoticons expressing positive feelings are usually classified as smileys. It is a form of parallel language used in electronic mail, internet forums and chat.
In his article related to this topic and published in the New York Times in 1996, Andrew Pollack writes about Yukihiro Furuse, a Japanese pioneer of networking who, amazed by strange combinations of punctuation marks and characters he encountered same time internet emerged in USA , tried to pass on this way of expressing to Japanese computer communication.
Besides insisting on the fact that this is one of the many phenomenon Japanese took from the westerners and further developed into their own distinctive version, Andrew Pollack emphasizes the emptiness of Japanese emoticons. He relates this to the way they communicate, where, as he states, comprehension relies much more on facial expressions of the person one is talking to and knowledge of the circumstances and context rather than on the word itself. In his opinion, the base for such vague expression is desire to avoid confrontation.
Fantastic diversity of Japanese emoticons he explains with the fact that Japanese are used to pictograms and thus much easier manage creating new ones, since their written language origins in Chinese characters. He also mentions technical information, which updated, says that in American computers each letter or punctuation mark is represented with one byte, a string of eight zeroes and ones, whose combinations give 256 possible characters (ASCII). Japanese computers however use two bytes for each character, in order to make possible enough combinations for representing the whole kanji. This is JIS X 0208-1990 system, total set of kana and kanji characters, but along with this one, the Japanese use standard ASCII set. Emoticons are created using both sets and even their combination.
basic American emoticon:
:-)
How broad their usage is speaks the fact that in some versions of Microsoft Office, AutoCorrect option recognizes basic smileys :-) and :-( and translates them into and .
more about original emoticons >>>
basic Japanese emoticon:
( ^ _ ^ )
Although Japanese emoticons are often represented in GIFs on web sites that cover this topic and due to the limitation for computers out of their region to recognize Japanese character set, it is possible to make very good doubles of the basic Japanese emoticons:
( * ^ . ^ * ) laughs and blushes
This is one of the typical Japanese emoticons. A dot instead of mouth is interpreted as a particularly cute expression of girl's face, because the traditional value of coyly smiling is still obeyed to some extent, where a woman even covers her mouth with hand when smiling. Blushing and shyness is also typical and is more often found with Japanese than with westerners.
Also typical is the emoticon representing Japanese cheer “Banzai!”
\( ^ ? ^ )/ happy with raising arms
A certain rule in the choice of system fonts can be noticed when following the usual exchange of information on the internet, and by which the communication is done: it seems that westerners mostly use Times and Japanese Verdana. A transformation of emoticons through system fonts is a phenomenon interesting to be shown through tables comparatively showing the following versions:
( ^ _ ^ ) Arial
( ^ _ ^ ) Times
( ^ _ ^ ) Georgia
( ^ _ ^ ) Courier
( ^ _ ^ ) Verdana
In the end, in one of the collections of Japanese emoticons there is an appeal for the people from specific language regions to participate in widening the collection through sending new emoticons they created using their own written language.
Roll up your sleeves and engage your little grey cells!
АБВГДЂЕЖЗИЈКЛЉМНЊОПРСТЋУФХЦЧЏШ
абвгдђежзијклљмнњопрстћуфхцчџш
Cyrillic emoticons, table1 >>>
~~~
Information sources:
Large list of emoticons
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Theme: EMOTICONS
Emoticons
Exchange of Skills