Today’s FLF Link is JapaneseEmoticons.net, or 日本の顔文字.

I’ve been looking for a site like this for a long time. There are quite a few of them out there, to be sure, but this is probably the cleanest, most nicely organized one I’ve come across.

Admittedly, it still doesn’t have that one I find myself constantly looking for, which resembles a person bowing to the ground, from the side. It looks something like this: __|-|O But I know that’s not quite right, and I just can’t seem to figure out the right way to do it. Would be great to use for apologizing, since all the variations on mOm just look like the word “mom”, and if you don’t realize the m’s are supposed to be hands, with the guy bowing towards you, you’ll be lost and confused.

In any case, Nihon no Kaomoji 日本の顔文字 has over 2500 emoticons, categorized by type (Angry, Apologizing, Bears…), and includes some really fantastic ones. Back when I had an iPhone, I was quite fond of some of the really lengthy sparkly ones.

☆*･゜ﾟ･*\(^O^)/*･゜ﾟ･*☆

Speaking of which, if you have an iPhone, simply by activating the Japanese keyboard, you can get access to a whole ton of emoji. Hold down the world button to switch to Japanese, and then, just press Shift, and a button marked ^_^ will appear next to the spacebar. Tap this, and it’ll bring up a whole ton of these complex Japanese emoticons for you to choose from.

To be honest, I’m a little disappointed that Nihon no Kaomoji doesn’t seem to include some of the most basic emoticons – like:

^_^

X_X

but I’m not so upset about it I’d flip the table.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻