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Thanks to the suggestion from one of the TKE readers the other day that I can write about Japanese emoticons, I’d like to share with you what kind of emoticons we usually use with cell phones in Japan. Emoticons are called “emoji” in Japanese. (“e”= picture “moji”= letters/characters) I think we have a lot of kawaii emoticons, some are still, while others even have a little movement.

There are basically 3 major cell phone (= keitai denwa in Japanese, and people call it “keitai” to make it short.) companies in Japan: Docomo, Softbank and au. Each company has developed its own emoticons but they are to be interpreted to the similar or equivalent ones when the email with emoticons is sent to someone whose cell phone belongs to other company. For instance, let’s say a boy has Docomo’s cell phone. When he sends an email with Docomo’s emoticons to a girl who has au’s cell phone, she will receive the email with emoticons translated into au’s emoticons. When there are no equivalent, it can be translated as a word that represents the emoticon.

Docomo (This page has more in detail.)

Softbank (This page has more in detail.)

au (This page has more in detail.)

As you see, Docomo’s emoticons are not very attractive compared with the other two.

Emoji like above are basically for cell phones. I’m sure you are interested in the case with computer…right?