1986

The boom of kaomoji in Japan

The boom of kaomoji. In Japanese Kanji, 顔 “Kao” means face and 文字 “Moji” means character. The Japanese believe that the eyes represent a human being’s soul. Thus kaomoji pays attention to the eyes, instead of the mouth like the western version of emoticons. They were utilizing the katakana character set and became very popular on the SCII NET of Japan.