Kaomoji Tools

Kaomoji (顔文字, literally "face characters") are the Japanese answer to the emoticon. Where a Western emoticon like :-) lies on its side and reads through the mouth, a kaomoji like (^_^) stands upright and does most of its talking through the eyes — a difference psychologists noticed when comparing how Japanese and American readers judge emotion in faces: Japanese observers weight the eyes, American observers the mouth. The first documented kaomoji appeared in 1986 on ASCII NET, a Japanese online service, where Yasushi Wakabayashi used (^_^) to mark jokes — thirteen years before Shigetaka Kurita drew the first emoji set at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. Kaomoji are the older art form, and unlike emoji they are pure text: no picture glyph, no color layer, nothing for an app to support or block.

That text-only nature is exactly why a copy-and-paste gallery beats memorizing anything. Kaomoji are assembled from dozens of character blocks at once — katakana for the classic ツ in the shrug, CJK brackets for cheeks, IPA letters for animal snouts, Tibetan and Canadian syllabics for the aesthetic sparkle sets — and no keyboard on earth types all of those. What your keyboard cannot produce, a clipboard carries perfectly: every face on these pages is one click away, and it lands in a Discord message, an Instagram bio or a TikTok comment as ordinary text that works everywhere.

The gallery is organized by the job a kaomoji does rather than by character tables, because nobody searches the Unicode block index when they want a crying cat. Happy, love and cute cover the friendly end of a conversation; sad, angry and the table flips cover the theatrical end; the animal sections gather bears, cats, dogs and the rest of the menagerie; and the aesthetic section collects the sparkle dividers (⋆𐙚₊˚⊹♡ and friends) that decorate bios and section breaks. Sleepy faces, greetings, winks and shocked expressions round out the everyday set. New combinations circulate constantly on Japanese and Korean social media, and the bank here is curated to the ones that survive rendering on current phones and desktops — a face that turns into tofu boxes helps no one, so borderline characters are left out on purpose.