Happy In the East (^_^) Or Smiling :-) In the West

By Andrew Pollack
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company

TOKYO –When Yukihiro Furuse first began prowling international computer networks in the mid-1980’s, he was perplexed to encounter emoticons, the strange combinations of punctuation and accent marks and letters that Westerners used in electronic mail to indicate happiness, sadness and other emotions.

But when Mr. Furuse and other network pioneers tried to incorporate symbols such as :-) into their domestic E-mail, their Japanese correspondents found the Western smiley — dare we say it — inscrutable.

"We had to write many times, ‘If you tilt your head, you will see the face,’ " said Mr. Furuse, who is director of the publications department at the Center for Global Communications, a research institute affiliated with International University of Japan.

:-)  Regular smile    (^_^)   Regular smile

:-(  Sad              (^o^;>) Excuse me

;-)  Wink             (^^;)   Cold sweat

:-)) Very happy       (^o^)   Happy

:-o  Wow              (*^o^*) Exciting

:-|  Grim             (_o_)   I’m Sorry

:-|| Anger            (^.^)   Woman’s smile

8-)  Smile/Glasses    (*^o^;) Sorry

:^)  Happy            (;_;)   Weeping

:^)  Unhappy          \(^_^)/ Bonzai smiley

So in the latest example of Japan seizing upon a Western idea, adapting it to their culture and improving upon it, Japanese computer users have evolved a unique set of emoticons. The Japanese smileys are intricate in their design, somewhat ambiguous in their expression and, in what many here would argue is a big advance, are right side up instead of sideways.

The basic smiley in Japan, (^_^), is much easier to recognize as a face than the Western version. But since the mouth doesn’t curve upward (no character on the keyboard can do that), the Japanese smiley is somewhat harder to understand without knowing the context.

However if you consider that people’s eyes crinkle when they smile or start to smile, this is just another case of one culture paying attention to a different aspect of reality than another. Crinkling the eyes is no more or less related to smiling than a curved mouth — ask any zoologist who studies apes and chimps.

"It’s the same with Noh masks," said Miho Ueda, head of the Internet division at Isenet, a networking company, referring to the masks with blank expressions used in a traditional form of Japanese drama. "They may appear expressionless to beginners, but they can be full of emotion if you understand."

Other emoticons are more clearly specific to Japanese culture. The girl’s smile, (^.^), with a dot for the mouth, because it is still considered impolite for women to bare their teeth in a grin, to the extent that some women still cover their mouths with their hand when they laugh. The "banzai" smiley, written (^_^)/ or sometimes (^o^)/, shows a character with arms raised in a traditional cheer.

Electronic mail and computer bulletin boards are used far less in Japan than in the United States. This is in part because the Japanese language, with its thousands of complex Chinese-based characters known as kanji, is not as keyboard-friendly as English. Also, market barriers and heavy regulations have kept personal computers and telecommunications very expensive.

They may appear expressionless to beginners, but they can be full of emotion if you understand. Miho Ueda

But those obstacles are being overcome, sales of PC’s are soaring and Japan is getting wired. And as the on-line culture evolves here, it is turning out to be slightly different from that in the West, at least as shown by what the Japanese call "kao maaku," or face marks.

Some experts familiar with on-line services in both Japan and the United States say the Japanese use the face marks more often than Westerners. This could be because the Japanese are used to looking at pictograms, since their written language is based on such characters.

It could also reflect the fact that even when they are off line, Japanese people do not express everything clearly in words. They tend to speak in a vague manner, relying on facial expressions and the other person’s understanding of the context to get the idea across.

"If it’s only words, it’s hard to express your feeling to the other party," said Tadahisa Hamada, an official at PC Van, a leading Japanese on-line information service.

One purpose of the vague manner of expression in conversations is to avoid confrontations. The same is generally true on line, although some arguments on electronic bulletin boards can get pretty nasty.

Perhaps to avoid offending others, Japanese people rarely use face marks showing anger or sadness. The most popular mark in Japan, besides the basic smile, is one depicting a cold sweat, (^^;). Another one that some use is "Excuse me," (^o^;>). The triangular shape on the right apparently represents a protruding elbow and stems from the fact that an embarrassed or apologetic person will sometimes scratch the back of his or her head.

Typing the seemingly intricate Japanese face marks is not as bothersome as it might appear, thanks to Japanese personal computers, which are designed to handle the input of even more intricate Chinese characters. PC users enter words in a simpler phonetic alphabet or even using English letters, and the computer converts the text automatically to kanji. This same approach, with some user programming, can be applied to smileys. For instance, type "niko," part of a Japanese word for smiling, press a button and the proper face mark will appear.

In American computers, each letter or punctuation mark is represented by one byte, a string of eight zeroes and ones, allowing for 256 possible characters. But Japanese computers use two bytes for each character, to allow for enough combinations to represent all the kanji. For punctuation marks, Japanese users can choose between single-byte and double-byte characters, with the latter being wider or appearing double-spaced. A double-byte smiley (^__^) is used to convey a stronger feeling than a single-byte one and often merits a line of its own in the message.

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