Since then, they’ve entered our vocabulary as a normal part of everyday life. It’s pretty common to see emoticons in texts, emails, Facebook posts, and pretty much anything you can type into.

In the century since the birth of the emoticon, they’ve come a long way. I think a lot of credit is due to the Japanese, who have seemingly elevated the emoticon to an art form. While in the US we were patting ourselves on the back for giving the smiley face a nose, the Japanese were integrating characters different languages to create emoticon masterpieces.

In Japan, they’re called kaomoji (顔文字) and range from huge, happy faces (*･゜ﾟ･*:.｡..｡.:*･'(*ﾟ▽ﾟ*)'･*:.｡. .｡.:*･゜ﾟ･*) to sad, despairing faces
( ；´Д｀) to a guy farting across the room (ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=┌(;￣◇￣)┘).

It’s not just the elaborate, multilingual kaomoji that make the Japanese the undisputed champions of emoticons; they also seem to be able to do more with less. Sometimes, it’s the emoticons that are simple and leave a lot to the imagination that are the most impressive.

What Japan Thinks posted a survey a few months back about Japan’s more abstract emoticons, the ones that take a little bit of imagination to visualize. Here are the top five, see if you can see what they’re supposed to represent:

1. ぬす (flying trapeze artist)
2. 尖 (droopy-eyed couple kissing)
3. チ゜フ (cat)
4. むU (dog)
5. でわ (a mouse looking over its shoulder)

In recent years though, emoticons have evolved into something else entirely.

Emoji

After decades of fumbling around with existing characters, humanity has decided to cheat a bit and create characters that represent the faces and actions that we’ve been trying to recreate all these years with numbers, letters, and punctuation.

They’re called emoji, or 絵文字 in Japanese, “picture character.” Instead of figuring out which characters to combine together to make a smiley face, you can just actually write a smiley face (☺).

We’ve talked before about how you can write some special characters in Japanese like music notes (♩　♫　♪　♬), arrows (→　←　↑　↓), and playing card symbols (♠　♣　♥　♦), but proper emoji goes way beyond that.

Here are just some of the emoji out there:

Standardization

Over the years, emoji have gone from an informal cell phone to an honest-to-God international standard. Emoji have been integrated into Unicode, and earlier this year, three of Japan’s biggest cell phone companies agreed to standardize their emoji.

It warms my heart to know that there are technology professionals working hard to make sure that when I send you two emoji representing a cat farting, it will show up perfectly on your phone.

How Do You Get Emoji?

If you’ve ever wanted to text your friend a little picture of a turd (yes you have), then you’ll be happy to hear that you too can join the emoji revolution. I’ve rounded up some instructions on how to enable emoji on your phone or computer.

iPhone

Emoji are already built in to most iPhones. Open up the settings menu, go to General Settings, and add the emoji keyboard. Now whenever you’re typing, press the little globe button in the bottom left of the keyboard to cycle through international keyboards, including the emoji keyboard.

Android

It’s a bit tougher for those of you on Android. It’s not actually officially supported on most Android phones at the moment, so your best bet is to scrounge the Google Play store to see what third-party apps can give you an emoji keyboard.

OS X

If you’re on a Mac, it’s all pretty much built in. Just press Command (⌘) + Option + T, which brings up the Keyboard and Character Viewer.

Windows

Emoji support is a little more spotty on Windows (especially older versions), but it looks like Microsoft is getting its shit together for Windows 8, and even backported it to Windows 7.

Of course, for pretty much every device and operating system, support is still kind of sketchy and new emoji are being added all the time, so don’t be too surprised if your phone or computer if missing your favorite face, animal, or sign. You can still rest easy that one day, maybe even soon, we’ll all be able to send emoji to each other, and maybe even avoid words altogether. 😃

Header image by Yahoo! Blog

Let me pull back the curtain for a bit and show the absolute nightmare that exists behind Japanese text on the internet.

Kanji, Kanji Everywhere

If you’re unfamiliar with Asian history and culture, ancient Chinese culture had a tremendous impact on virtually every culture in East Asia. Other countries in Asia adopted Chinese food (like ramen!), customs, and parts of the language.

Most of you probably already know that the complicated characters in Japanese called kanji come from Chinese characters, but it doesn’t stop there. Korean has its own adaptation of Chinese characters called hanja, and until colonialism, Vietnamese used Chinese characters in its language.

These are all known as han characters, or sometimes CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters.

You’d think that this would be a good thing, right? All these different countries and cultures using han characters, it’s like everybody’s joined hands and is singing We Are The World, right?

Oh, if only.

Why Kanji Doesn’t Look Quite Right On The Internet

Why are these han characters a problem? It has something to do with Unicode, a commonly used standard that’s used to display text from different languages on computers.

Somewhere down the line, somebody thought that it would be a great idea to save time and space by saying that, in Unicode, all of these han characters are, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same. This process was called Han Unification, and would soon become the bane of my existence.

Han Unification is a problem because han characters can look different and mean different things in each language.

Just take a look at this picture: it’s the same Unicode character, rendered in five different languages:
The Chinese versions look completely different from the other languages.

Unless the website explicitly says that a piece of kanji text is Japanese (with the HTML lang attribute), it won’t look quite right. It might use the Chinese style and make everything else (i.e. kana) look out of place.

This becomes a problem more often than you might think, whether it’s on your phone, when using electronic flashcards, or just reading the news.

And when you throw in different fonts, operating systems, and browsers into the mix, all bets are off.

Worse still, people argue that this is exactly what Unicode should be like. The argument is that, despite stylistic and cultural differences, underneath it all these characters are essentially the same.

I can understand the rationale behind Han Unification but, since I have the emotional capacity of a child and just want things to work, I’m going to say that it’s dumb and stupid and I hate it.

Why Japanese Isn’t Readable On The Internet

But hey, if your kanji looks wrong, all’s not lost. You can always use furigana, the simple, little characters you see above kanji to help you read them. Right?

Wrong.

While there is the technology to do this on the web (the HTML ruby element), you won’t see it much. It just doesn’t work on all web browsers (like Firefox), and few people choose to use it on their websites.

I would love to include furigana in the kanji I write to make it easier for beginners, but right now it’s not really an option.

But, unfortunately, web developers seem much more interested in tech demos and proof-of-concept sites than making sure the web looks as good in other languages as it does in English.

Maybe someday Japanese will get the first-class treatment on the web that it deserves, but right now I think we have a long way to go.