When I started teaching a module on Japanese digital culture as part of my language arts class, I wanted to go beyond the usual textbook approach. I thought it would be fun to show students how Japanese people actually communicate online — not just the language, but the emotion behind it. That's when I discovered kaomoji.
Kaomoji are Japanese text-based emoticons made entirely from Unicode characters. Unlike emoji, which are tiny images, kaomoji are pure text — like (╥﹏╥) for sadness or (≧◡≦) for excitement. They work everywhere: in documents, presentations, emails, even handwritten worksheets if you want to get creative. I thought they'd be the perfect bridge between language learning and cultural understanding.
The problem was finding a good resource. I tried Googling "Japanese emoticons" and got a mess of results — random blog posts with broken formatting, tiny lists of maybe 20 faces, and sites plastered with ads that I definitely couldn't show in a classroom. I needed something clean, organized, and easy for students to browse on their own devices during class.
After way too much searching, I found a site called Kaomojiya, a Japanese Emoticons website. It had thousands of kaomoji sorted into categories — happy, sad, angry, cute, animals, greetings, and dozens more. Each one had a one-click copy button, so students could just tap and paste. No sign-up, no app to install, no paywall. It just worked.
I built an entire lesson around it. First, I had students explore different emotional categories and pick kaomoji that matched vocabulary words we'd been studying. Then they wrote short dialogues using only kaomoji to convey emotions — the class had to guess what each conversation was about. The engagement was unlike anything I'd seen. Students who usually stayed quiet were suddenly laughing, sharing their favorites, and debating whether (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ or (╬ Ò﹏Ó) was the better "angry face."
What surprised me most was the depth of conversation it sparked. We ended up discussing how different cultures express emotions online, why Japan developed text-based faces instead of relying on image-based emoji, and how communication styles differ across platforms like LINE versus iMessage. One student even did her final project on the history of kaomoji in 1980s Japanese bulletin boards.
The tool itself saved me a ton of prep time too. Instead of manually copying emoticons from random sources and formatting them into slides, I could just pull up the site, grab what I needed in seconds, and keep the lesson moving. It also works great on iPads, which is what most of my students use in class.
If you're teaching anything related to Japanese language, digital communication, or even just looking for a creative warm-up activity, I'd honestly recommend giving kaomoji a try. It turned what I expected to be a dry cultural sidebar into one of the most memorable lessons of the semester.
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