About Kaomoji
Faces made out of characters, one page per gesture, in English and Japanese. Nothing here is an image and nothing needs to load.
A different tradition from 🙂
The Western emoticon is read sideways: a colon, a hyphen, a bracket, tilt your head. A kaomoji
is read straight on, and because Japanese input methods reach a far wider set of characters, the
face can have real eyes, real hands and real posture. That is the whole difference, and it is why
a kaomoji can wave, bow, flip a table or pat somebody on the head while :-) can only
smile.
One gesture per page
Somebody looking for a bowing face and somebody looking for a crying face are not the same
visitor, so they do not get the same page. Each page here collects the faces for one gesture and
says which characters do the work — which one is the hand, which one is the tear, which one
is only there for spacing.
Why half of it is in Japanese
Kaomoji are a Japanese form and the vocabulary for them is Japanese: ぺこり
is not quite a bow, ドヤ顔 is not quite smugness, and
スヤァ has no English word at all. The Japanese pages are written in
Japanese for readers who already use these daily, not translated from the English ones.
What we do not do
No account, no sign-in, nothing to install. Every face on this site is text, so copying one
takes a tap and pasting it works anywhere text goes.