The emoticon generation

A few months ago, my dad started using Zalo for the first time. I remember dropping him a little welcome message filled with heartfelt emoticons like this:

“Look who’s finally on Zalo

ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ (๑˘︶˘๑) ♡＼(￣▽￣)／♡ (つ≧▽≦)つ”

He texted back asking me from which planet this alien language came from. I know my dad has a good sense of humour, but I can also imagine him shaking his head as he was typing the message. I have gotten so used to these higgledy-piggledy characters jumping around online conversations that sometimes I forget they might raise some eyebrows of those who just start grasping the concept of social media.

For a person who spends every hour a day social networking for the past 5 years, it has become somewhat my first instinct to use these cute Japanese emoticons called Kaomoji in my messages. My friends and I never found a better way to express “I love you” than bombarding each other with a series of puppy-eyed, heart-blowing faces: they make it easier to express sentiments, especially those that may sound too cheesy. Communication, evidently, has come a long way from my dad’s generation.

iPhone now offers an entire keyboard for Kaomoji

I believe the super influence of Japanese popular culture is partly responsible for this. With its invasion across Southeast Asia, Kaomoji has been filling up every corner of the Net. Netizens can’t stop gushing over them, for a Kaomoji can be easily created and personalised from the set of Japanese characters and punctuations, unlike its pixelated counterpart. And so they keep growing bigger and more diverse to cater to different needs of self-expression. As of present, there are over 10,000 Kaomoji in online databases, four times more than the number of emoji.

For Japanese young people, Kaomoji in online conversations has been a social norm since… 16 years ago. In a country where expression of negative emotion is a no-no, Kaomoji was hailed as conversation saviour as soon as it was introduced. Anthropologists Hirofumi Katsuno & Christine R. Yano in Face to Face: On-line Subjectivity in Contemporary Japan found that Kaomoji is often associated with lightness, playfulness, and even femininity. Most Japanese use Kaomoji almost automatically in communication and interpret them effortlessly. They believe that a message without any emoticons means something is not right.

“I used kaomoji when my messages sounded too serious. Kaomoji have the power to soften the nuance of a message”, shared Mr. Kato - an interviewee in Katsuno and Yano’s focus group research. He gave an example of public chat rooms, where participants from different backgrounds often struggle between sounding disrespectfully casual and sounding too serious. “I solved this dilemma by using a formal mode of writing, and then making it informal by adding kaomoji like (AA;).”

It is often argued that these types of emoticon are, ironically, making the world less emotional. Digital anthropologist Pamela Pavliscak believes that we use the enthusiastic and caring digital faces to cover up our lack of care and enthusiasm. On the social media sphere where personal problems are shared publicly and privately every two minute, Kaomoji seems like a safe mouthpiece. It is likely that we would choose to send a sad face to an acquaintance who just lost their job rather than typing down a 500-word paragraph telling them how sorry we are. “Instead of sorting out our own emotions or trying to understand what the people we care about are feeling, our digital impulse is to keep things light”, claimed Pavliscak.

While Kaomoji, indeed, is helping us maintaining the lightness, Katsuno and Yano argued that it is establishing a new kind of intimacy. Computer-mediated communication lacks the physical and symbolic interaction that face-to-face communication has to convey sentiments, and Kaomoji does a great job making up for it. In the digital world, Kaomoji is the digital replica of our face and hands, enabling us to not only cover up, but also display and negotiate feelings the way facial expressions and body language do.

“Kaomoji place their own bodies up on the computer screen, drawing intimates into their ‘true feelings’, a face staring back amidst a sea of characters”, said Katsuno and Yano. This new medium for intimacy challenges Internet users to get creative with Kaomoji to communicate what they want. It is up to us - the emoticon generation - to choose how to utilise it: a cheery mask for socialisation, or a mirror of our expressive selves.

The birth of a new language

At first glance, Kaomoji is an innocuous way to add feelings and personality to the plain text we send everyday. I had always thought so, until a few days ago when I came across this video:

It seems like digital communication has come to the point where these digital visuals not only complement text, but replace text to tell an eloquent story. This might further confirm the “conspiracy theory” that emoticon is on its way to take over languages. Back in 2014, netizens across the globe were thrilled by the news of a social network called “emojli” where users communicate only through emoji. The site attracted over 50,000 people reserving usernames, which were undoubtedly sequences of emojis, within two days of its announcement. Those on the Net in 2016 must not forget the phenomenon that is “Emoji Dick” - an attempt to translate every line of Moby Dick into emojis, final product of which draws up to $300 worth of sales per month.

Does this mean we are close to accepting emoticon as a language? Or, better yet, replacing written language with emoticon? Its literary potential has always been a hot topic of debate. On the against side of the argument, Psychologist World stated that emoticon is simply not enough. “A limited choice of emoticons restricts the range of emotions that we can express, and does not allow for the subtle nuances or strengths of emotion that we experience”. Such is the lack of nuances in an emoticon that each users has to take their own interpretation of it, which can lead to miscommunication. In fact, my friends and I have gotten into quite many confusing situations when the smiley face “:D” is used, because we are still not sure if it is a big grinning face, or a sarcastic smile.

But that might not be the case for Kaomoji. Katsuno and Yano found that in contrast to Western emoticons and emojis, Kaomoji has to be much more complex to reflect the diversity of nonverbal behaviours that are essentially part of Japanese culture. First, let’s take a look at the many ways Japanese depict surprise.

、 (Д、 ミ ノД)ノ

Panic-stricken, looking from side to side in alarm (reduplicated

face), hands raised.

、 (◦Д◦;)ノ!!

Dismayed, cold sweat trickling down side of face, hands raised.

\(@o@)/

Sheer fright, eyes wide in astonishment, hands raised.

It does not take a linguist to see the different levels of surprise in these Kaomoji. As it is made up of easily typed-in Japanese characters and punctuations, Kaomoji has the flexibility that allows Japanese to express different shades of emotion as thoroughly as with written words. It all comes down to choosing between trying to search for the right adjectives with the right adverbs to describe how strong our feeling is, or picking a Kaomoji that visualises just that.

“Japanese language can cross sounds and images, switch time and space easily. It usually requires Japanese speakers to translate images into sounds and vice versa” - Tanaka Y.

Sound is another important component unique to Kaomoji. Heavily influenced by manga, Kaomoji frequently makes use of onomatopoetic expressions to blow sound into visuals. This layer of nuance takes Kaomoji to a level of descriptiveness that emoji and Western emoticon are yet to reach. For example:

ºo(ºo•(ェ)•oº)ºシクシク

A crying Kaomoji. シクシク (Shikushiku) is onomatopoeia for weeping.

(*¯▿¯*)Bye ε=ε=ε=ε=ε= タタタタ

A Kaomoji waving goodbye. タタタタ (tatatata) is onomatopoeia for walking away rapidly.

⌈(;¯▿¯)…º.☆oº.☆ドロン♪

A running Kaomoji. ロン (doron) is manga-based onomatopoeia for vanishing.

Yet, it is also this complexity that poses a limitation. Let’s get back to my problem with the smiley face for an example. Instead of the confusing “:D”, my friends and I usually opt for the Kaomoji (^.^) to show a shy pouty smile. It was not until I did the research for this blog that I learned that the “.” in the Kaomoji signifies a “high-class, snobbish laugh” in Japanese culture, according to Kris Markman and Sae Oshima. If we were to talk in an international group chat, we may have offended a few Japanese friends.

Min Lim, too, acknowledged that different cultures will have different interpretation of a Kaomoji. “Naturally, using kaomoji does not resolve all misunderstandings that can arise with text-based messaging, and its complexity and extensiveness can be confusing”, Lim concluded.

So, unless one day the world can agree that this message below:

||Φ|(|´･|ω|･｀|)|Φ||～(´･ω･｀～)(～´･ω･｀)～～(´･ω･｀～)(～´･ω･｀)～||liil||liil||li(´・ω・｀)il||liil||liil||li

means “I am in jail. What to do?”, we are still far away from accepting Kaomoji as a language.