Kaomoji
Japanese emoticons are read upright rather than sideways, which is why the eyes sit level and the expression lives in the brackets. Click any face to copy it.
Happy
Sad
Angry
Love
Surprised
Shrug
Cute animals
Why they read upright
Western emoticons are read sideways, with the head rotated ninety degrees. Kaomoji are read straight on: the eyes sit level and the expression lives between them. The convention emerged on Japanese bulletin boards in the 1980s, and it is why kaomoji tend to be wider and more elaborate.
How they are built
Most are assembled from ordinary punctuation plus characters borrowed from other scripts — Japanese kana, Cyrillic letters, mathematical symbols. Nothing here is a dedicated emoticon character; each face is a small collage of existing code points, which is exactly why they paste anywhere plain text is accepted.
Rendering caveats
Because the pieces come from several Unicode blocks, a face that renders perfectly on one device can show empty boxes on another that lacks a font for one component. The simpler faces built from common punctuation are the most portable; the elaborate ones using rarer characters are the most fragile.
Where they work best
Kaomoji suit chat, comments and captions, where their width is not a problem and the tone is informal. They are a poor fit for usernames, which reject most of the characters involved, and for anything read aloud — a screen reader announces each component character by name, so a face built from eight symbols becomes eight spoken words with no meaning attached.