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It’s hard enough trying to keep up with the latest English terminology and slang around the use of mobes, the UK’s preferred unpleasantly ugly term for mobile phones (mobe is short for mobile phones), but with the Japanese terms keitai (that’s the Japanese slang for cell phone) now appearing in the English language, us old friends can sometimes find it difficult to understand what it is. This article will try to explain two common phrases and one not-so-common one that seem to be making the rounds of the SNS generation.
kaomoji
literally this is face letters, but are often also known as Japanese emoticons. These accept not just alphabetic characters, but the full range of symbol characters, Japanese, Greek, Russian kanji characters, dingbats, and whatever else you can find to make a variety of horizontal faces. The classic cat emoticon =^.^= is a simple example, but searching the internet for a term like “kaomoji dictionary” will reveal hundreds, if not thousands, of kaomoji to represent just about every emotion or situation you can imagine. , and a good number that you could not!
I find it interesting that there are many, many articles on how western smileys came to be like :-), but very little has been done to reveal the history of Japanese kaomoji. As far as I can determine, it was a Korean person in Japan in early 1986 who came up with the emoticon (^_^) and a Japanese nuclear scientist who came up with (~_~) around the same time.
emoji
Move one step up the evolutionary ladder and we get to emoji, literally picture letters. These were first popularized on Japanese mobile phones, displaying a small icon instead of characters in an email. Almost all phones now support a full range of over a hundred of these icons, and they are a must-have feature for the vast majority of users in Japan, because even if people don’t type them, contacts are still likely to send mail. complete electronics. from them! They also infect Japanese blogs, and for many people they replace punctuation within their text. Some of the mobile service providers now even animate the glyphs, which brings us to the final term.
decomail
Decomail is actually derived from English, being short for mail decoration. decorated mail would be more grammatically correct, but the official full name is in fact decoration. This should actually be familiar to many readers, as it’s just a marketing name for HTML-based email on a mobile phone, allowing for simple text decoration through features like scrollable banners, embedded images, text lined and color selection. A major manifestation of decomail is the use of what is effectively animated emoji, allowing tiny animations to be inserted into email, and some phones come pre-loaded with animations numbering in the thousands! However, these images are not limited to just small animated emoji (kaoani – animated faces – are a manifestation and another term to be discussed at a later date), but they can also be larger and can even be Flash with simple scripts.
As mentioned at the beginning of this section, decomail is HTML mail, which means that yes, you can send these messages to foreign friends directly from your Japanese cell phone! Sometimes you can get it, too, but since size and other limitations on a cell phone are pretty severe, there’s less of a guarantee that it’ll actually work.
So I hope it gives you an idea of how the Japanese liven up their mobile emails. I don’t have the space to mention that Google’s Gmail can display emoji, or that Apple and Google are trying to standardize emoji in Unicode, or even 2-channel emoticons, but I hope you now know the definition of kaomoji, emoji, and decomail if you listen to them on the conversation.