11

Ilaria Moschini*

The “Face with Tears of Joy” Emoji. A Socio-Semiotic and Multimodal

Insight into a Japan-America Mash-Up

Abstract
The blog site of the Oxford Dictionaries features a post dated November 16 2015, which announces that, “for the first
time ever”, their “Word of the Year” is not a word, but a pictograph: the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. The term
emoji, which is a loanword from Japanese, identifies “a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion
in electronic communication” (OED 2015).
The sign was chosen since it is the item that “best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015”.
Indeed, the Oxford Dictionaries’ President, Caspar Grathwohl declared that emojis are “an increasingly rich form of
communication that transcends linguistic borders” and reflects the “playfulness and intimacy” of global digital culture.
Adopting a socio-semiotic multimodal approach, the present paper aims at decoding the many semantic and semiotic
layers of the 2015 “Word of the Year”, with a special focus on the context of cultures out of which it originates. More in
detail, the author will focus on the concept of translation as “transduction”, that is the movement of meaning across sign
systems (Kress 1997), in order to map the history of this ‘pictographic word’ from language to language, from culture to
culture, from niche discursive communities to the global scenario. Indeed, the author maintains that this ‘pictographic
word’ is to be seen as a marker of the mashing up of Japanese and American cultures in the discursive practices of geek
communities, now gone mainstream thanks to the spreading of digital discourse.

Keywords
Geek Culture – Emojis – Emoticons – Kaomoji – Manga – Multimodality – Social Semiotics – Transduction

“I don’t consider [my drawings] pictures –

I think of them as a kind of hieroglyphics …
I’m writing a story with a unique type of symbol”
Osamu Tezuka

1. Introduction
The blog site of the Oxford Dictionaries features a post dated November 16 2015 which an-
nounces that, “for the first time ever”, their “Word of the Year” is not a word, but a pictograph:
the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Face with Tears of Joy Emoji

* Ilaria Moschini
Department of Languages, Literatures and Intercultural Studies
University of Florence
Via S. Reparata, 93-95 – 50129 Firenze
Italy
ilaria.moschini@unifi.it

Hermes – Journal of Language and Communication in Business no 55-2016

12

The term “emoji” is a loanword from Japanese (the plural of which can be both emoji or emo-
jis), a portmanteau that blends “e ‘picture’ and moji ‘letter, character” and identifies “a small dig-
ital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication” (OED 2015).
The word was chosen since it is the item that “best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupa-
tions of 2015”. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionaries’ President, Caspar Grathwohl declared that emo-
jis are “an increasingly rich form of communication, that transcends linguistic borders” and re-
flects the “playfulness and intimacy” of global digital culture, which is “visually driven, emotion-
ally expressive, and obsessively immediate” (Steinmetz 2015).
According to data from the Oxford Dictionaries Corpus and Oxford Dictionaries’ digital partner,
the mobile technology company SwiftKey (2015), the “Face with Tears of Joy” was the most used
emoji in 2015 (“20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US”), while
the word emoji itself has faced a similar increase, since “its usage more than tripled in 2015
over the previous year”. In addition to that, in March 2015, Instagram declared that digital lan-
guage has “evolved such that nearly half of comments and captions on [its platform] contain emo-
ji characters” (Davis/Edberg 2015).
Emojis thus appear to be a widespread method of communication that can potentially cross lan-
guage barriers and, even, enrich written language since, as the linguist Ben Zimmer affirms, emo-
jis can “function as a new form of punctuation” (Robb 2014).
Moreover, the acquisition by the Library of Congress (Allen 2013) of the intersemiotic ‘emo-
jified’ translation of Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick (Benenson 2010) may also suggest
that emojis can be used, like pictograms, to vehicle ideas not only emotions. This conceptual/
narrative usage of emoji characters has been underlined also by the electoral tweet sent by Sen-
ator Hillary Clinton in August 2015, where she exhorted her followers to express “in 3 emojis or
less” their feelings about student loan debts (see Figure 2).


Figure 2. Hillary Clinton’s Electoral Tweet

The present paper aims at decoding the many semantic and semiotic layers of the “Face with
Tears of Joy”, with a special critical focus on the cultural contexts out of which it originates.
More in detail, it will focus on the concept of translation as multimodal “transduction”, that is
the movement of meaning across sign systems (Kress 1997) in order to socio-semiotically “map
the history of the resource” of emojis (van Leeuwen 2004: 3) and its ‘translation’ from language
to language, from culture to culture, from niche discursive communities to the global digital sce-
nario. It is a theoretical standpoint that can be contextualized in the emerging interest in Transla-
tion Studies towards multimodality, especially with reference to texts that present a multi-coded
structure.
As regards its structure, the paper will start from an outline of the theoretical framework adopt-
ed; it will then concentrate on the first set of emojis, those “pictographic words” created by the
Japanese telecommunication planner Shigetaka Kurita and on their main linguistic/semiotic and
cultural influences.
 13

The text will proceed with the analysis of the globalization process of emojis, from their en-
coding in the Unicode system to their visual hybridization with the “smiley” symbol. Finally, it
will focus on the transpacific intertextual chain of semiosis that pragmatically and historically
links emojis to emoticons and kaomoji, that are common markers of facial expressions created
with keyboard characters by niche sub-cultural communities, such as early computer users and
fandoms.

2. Intersemiotic Translation and Multimodal Studies

The English term “translation” derives from the Old French verb “translater” and/or directly from
the Latin “translatus”, the past principle of the verb “transferre”, that means “to carry over, to
bring over” (OED 2015). The etymology of the term reveals the foundational idea around which
the activity of translating is conceptualized in Western Countries (Tymoczko 2005a), that is to
“carry something across”, this ‘something’ being the meaning which is transferred across cultur-
al, national and linguistic borders.
The effect of such movements from a code to another code, from a country to another country,
from a culture to another culture usually implies a wide and varied spectrum of changes and al-
terations in the semantic and semiotic sphere. This is especially true in the contemporary scenario
that features the spreading of digitally mediated texts, which are constantly re-codified and re-sig-
nified giving rise to linguistic, semiotic and cultural hybrids.
As a consequence of the massive technological developments and of the related social process
of globalization, interests in Translation Studies have been increasingly moving towards the third
category of translation theorized by Roman Jakobson, namely “intersemiotic translation” (Ty-
moczko, 2005b: 1090). Indeed, in his seminal paper “On linguistic aspects of translation” (Jakob-
son 2004 [1959]: 139), the Russian-American structuralist identified three types of translation: in
the context of the same linguistic code, from language to language and from a signifying system
to another.
More in detail, Jakobson’s taxonomy featured the first category as an “intralingual traslation”,
that is “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language” (e.g. a pro-
cess of rewording a specialized jargon into common language). His second category, the “interlin-
gual translation” is a “proper translation” and refers to the activity of interpreting “verbal signs by
means of some other language”. His final category, “intersemiotic translation”, or “transmutation”
was defined as the “interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign systems”.
A definition that draws on semiotics, that is the general science of communication through signs
and sign systems, of which language is but one (Munday 2012).
The above-mentioned link between Translation Studies and semiotics was favored by Jakob-
son’s use of Peircean semiotics, which is based on the assumption that all signs can be translated
into other signs (Stecconi 2010). Such initial connection can probably explain why Peircean se-
miotics figures prominently in research on intersemiotic translation (Gorlée 1994, Torop 2000),
while other approaches like, for instance, those emerging from the functional and socio-semiotic
tradition such as Multimodality do not appear.
However, the situation has changed in the last decade since Translation scholars have dedicated
their attention to texts that feature a multisemiotic composition (e.g. Taylor 2004, Gambier 2006,
Snell-Hornby 2006, Dejardins 2008, O’Sullivan/Jeffcote 2013, Borodo 2015) and have advocated
for theories and frameworks that would help in the practice of translating artifacts, the design of
which features the structural combination of different semiotic modes (Kress/van Leeuwen 2001).
Understanding how people make meaning through various semiotic resources and the rela-
tionship of these practices with self-representation or with the representation of others is a major
focus of Multimodal Studies, especially in its social semiotic formulation (Jewitt 2009). Indeed,
a socio-semiotic approach to multimodality postulates a common communication trajectory that
involves three interconnected steps: what people want to signify, the relationship between what
14

people want to signify and which ways of communication or signs are more suitable in given so-
cio-cultural contexts (Kress/Jewitt 2003).
The production of signs, that is a “combination of meaning and form” (Kress 1997: 6), is “mo-
tivated” (Hodge/Kress 1993) and people’s moves from mode to mode and from media to media
are driven by interests and by “what is possible to express and represent, readily, easily with a
mode, given its materiality and given the cultural social history of the mode” (Kress/Jewitt 2003:
14). “Mode”, which is a key term in Multimodal Studies, refers to the set of resources that people
in a given culture can use to communicate, while the word “media” refers to the channel of com-
munication (Kress 1997: 7).
This socio-semiotic and multimodal approach to intersemiotic translation will be used in the
present analysis, as previously said, to historically outline the chain of the subsequent resemioti-
zations (Kress 2000, Iedema 2001) of the “Face with Tears of Joy” starting from the creation of
the first set of emojis.

3. The cultural and technological background of Japanese emoji

The Japanese telecommunication planner Shigetaka Kurita is credited with inventing emojis in
1999, when he was involved in the launch of a mobile Internet platform called “i-mode” (Blag-
don 2013).
At the time, Kurita was working at NTT Docomo, one of the largest mobile services in Japan
as a member of the “i-mode” team, the aim of which was to provide Internet service on a type of
mobile phones, the so-called “featured phones”, which had small LCD screens that could only
‘contain’ up to 48 letters. This monochrome site of display would have highly limited the ex-
change of information, and this is the reason why Kurita started to plan the creation of alphanu-
meric images that would take the emoticons (that had already gained popularity on the Internet)
to a strictly iconic level.
Kurita stated that the American AT&T was already offering information for cell phone users
but “everything was shown by text, even the weather forecast”, even if “Japanese weather fore-
casts have always included pictures or symbols to describe the weather” (Nakano 2015). Kurita’s
familiarity with this way of producing information led him to envision the possibility to create
text messages using images rather than words.
The first set of emojis designed by him was made of 180 items that comprised not only smiley
faces representing emotions, but also objects and symbols such as light bulbs or bombs (see Fig-
ure 3). “I was working with the sense of creating a new alphabet – he declared – It was an attempt
to create texts rather than a sense of making pictures” (Nakano 2015).

Figure 3. Some of the first emojis designed by Shigetaka Kurita, © NTT Docomo

For inspiration, Kurita turned primarily to “manga, kanjii characters and street signs” (Negishi
2014). As regards manga, that are Japanese comics, the inspiration Kurita derived from them was
 15

related primarily to their unique use of symbolic representation of emotions. Indeed, as Wall-
ested (2013: 5) explains:
Manga have a large diversity of metaphorical figure symbols called keiyu, that are not considered as
words or representational pictures, but act as symbolic adjectives or adverbs to events depicted. Keiyu
consist of manga symbols (manpu) and effect symbols (kouka). [These] symbols are applied to char-
acters or subjects as representational indicators denoting their physical (butsuriteki) states and/or as
metaphorical indicators connoting their psychological (shinriteki) states (Natsume/Takekuma, 1995).

Many of the metaphorical figure symbols mentioned in the quotation require an effort to be de-
coded, since their conceptual underpinnings are deeply rooted in Japanese cultural and visual
conventions, like the “gigantic sweat drop conveying embarrassment or nervousness”, that is
shown in Figure 4 (Cohn 2010: 7).


Figure 4. Visual Morpheme “Giant Sweat Drop”, source Morphology of Japanese Visual Language- re-
trieved at http://www.visuallanguagelab.com/A/jvlmorphology.html

As Wallestad explains, “one of the most used keiyu-manpu is the drop (suiteki)”, which can rep-
resent “both physical and psychological states” (2013: 6). Indeed, such a symbol can be applied
to different parts of the face, with its placement influencing the meaning, and be associated with
“sweat, tears, saliva, nasal discharge, or water. [When] applied to the eyes, the drop(s) (suiteki)
become tears (namida) that can express sadness or overwhelming joy” (Wallestad 2013: 6).
The use of keiyu-manpu is a cultural and aesthetic tradition that, according to the French histo-
rian Jean-Marie Bouissou (2011 [2010]: 127), can be traced back to ancient woodblock printing
techniques, where movements were suggested by the eyes and the mouths of the represented sub-
jects and to the tradition of the Kabuki theatre, where a wide range of emotions was rendered by
the grotesque facial distortions of the actors.
The “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji appears to be consistent with such a visual vocabulary, es-
pecially with the symbolic representation of drops as “namida”, that are here used to express a
profound and unrestrained state of contentment.
As regards the influence of kanji, the logographic Chinese characters adopted in Japan, Kurita
declared that he “took from kanji the ability to express abstract ideas” in a single character (Blag-
don 2013). As a matter of fact, ideograms derive from pictographs - that are pictorial representa-
tions for words and phrases - which imply a symbolic conceptualization of ideas. For what con-
cerns their shape, they all feature a squared form and are usually made up of two elements: the
“hen”, which defines the semantic area of the kanji, functioning thus as a sort of key to the gen-
eral meaning of the character, and a ‘body’ that specifies its actual meaning (Taylor/Taylor 1995).
Japanese traditional writing system seems to have deeply influenced the structure of the ba-
sic unit of manga, where each element is not a neutral embellishment but, rather, a means of ex-
pression (Bouissou 2011 [2010]: 119). Indeed, as Hirofumi Katsuno and Christine Yano explain
(quoting Natsume/Takekuma, 1995), “a single frame of manga consists of not only simply draw-
ings and words, but a complex visual grammar of subject, object, word balloon, movement, back-
ground keiyu (figure symbol) and on’yu (sound symbol)” (2002: 213).
16

Together with the conceptual representation of objects and ideas, Kurita’s original emojis ap-
pear to have inherited from kanji characters the vertical orientation and their squared form.
Moreover, like their predecessors kaomoji (that are Japanese emoticons), emojis have drawn upon
the visual language of manga where the eyes are considered “the locus of facial expressivity”
(Katsuno/Yano 2002: 214).
The standardization of manga visual language is commonly attributed to Osamu Tezuka (Cohn
2010: 4), who is defined as the “godfather of modern manga” and who had been greatly influ-
enced by the drawings of Walt Disney animated movies (Schodt 1983, 1996). As a matter of fact,
the salience of the eyes, which has become a distinctive feature of manga visual style, is an el-
ement that Tezuka derived from Disney and, more precisely, from the movie Bambi, where huge
round eyes were used to emphasize the emotive expressions of the faces (Pellitteri 2008: 198).
This element of manga visual design is a marker of the different and subsequent economic and
cross-cultural encounters between America and Japan that have occurred since the Nineteenth
century (Schodt 1994).
Going back to the creation of emojis, the modal affordance Kurita could use to design them
allowed him to ‘play’ only with a 12-by-12-pixel grid to translate images into a set of characters
able to be easily displayed on mobile screens. The result was a collection of very simple signs:
the original smiling face, for instance, featured up-side down Vs to indicate the eyes and a rec-
tangle that served as the mouth (see the first emoji on the left side of the first column in Figure 3).
Apart from the simplicity of the design due to the above mentioned technological restraints, if
we compare Kurita’s “happy face” with the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji, we can easily see that
the form is different, since the “Face with Tears of Joy” is a yellow rounded sign.
In order to explain such a difference and to decode the socio-cultural and pragmatic meanings
associated to it, it is necessary to trace out other steps in the transduction across languages and
across cultures of the face sign that has become a pervasive component of contemporary global
digital culture, starting from its inclusion in the Unicode encoding system.

4. Going global: from Japan to the Unicode

In 1999 emojis began to be available on Japanese mobile phones and became immediately pop-
ular, although they created problems related to the fact that their codification had not been stand-
ardized. Indeed, since each mobile phone carrier had developed different (even if partially over-
lapping) sets of characters, each mobile vendor used their own text encoding extensions.

Figure 5. Mark Davis’ Keynote Speech at the 38th Unicode Conference (a snapshot), ©Unicode – retrieved
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n9ONNeACyw

As Unicode President and co-founder Mark Davis (2014) explained in his keynote speech at the
38th International and Unicode Conference, which was dedicated to “the past, the present and the
future of emojis”, there were codes that were associated to different images, but there were also
almost identical images that were identified by different codes, such as the penguins in Figure 5.
The result was that characters from different platforms could not always be displayed and emojis
 17

were replaced by the symbol of the question mark that was meant to signify the ‘untranslatability’
of the message. The situation worsened when non-Japanese mobile companies began to support
exchange with the original carriers (Davis/Edberg 2015).
It was Google that submitted an official request to the Unicode Consortium to have emojis
standardized since, in 2006, it had decided to enter the Japanese mobile market (Nasser/ Benen-
son et al., 2013). The interest in Japanese mobile market was due to the fact that it was more de-
veloped if compared to its American counterpart (Baron 2008: 128). However, it was only with
the release of Apple’s mobile operating system iOS 5 in late 2011, that emojis “made their real
international debut” (Blangdon 2013).
Technically, nowadays the term “emoji” refers to a single set of Unicode characters that is as-
sociated to an image (Davis/Edberg 2015). Unicode is an international computer industry stand-
ard for encoding and displaying most of the world’s writing systems that allows one operating
system to recognize text from another (Unicode Consortium 2015b). The Unicode represents the
foundation for software internationalization and standardization and, as Joseph D. Becker –
one of the co-founders – affirmed (1998 [1988]: 1), it was envisioned as “a new, worldwide AS-
CII” that is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Indeed, prior to the crea-
tion of Unicode, much of the computer world relied on the character encoding for English text,
which was the 7-bit ASCII. Since the people of the world, “need to be able to communicate and
to compute in their own native language, other than English”, with the spreading of computers
there was the rising of the necessity of an “international/ multilingual text encoding standard that
[was] reliable as ASCII, but that cover[ed] all the scripts of the world” (Becker 1998 [1988]: 2).
At semiotic level, the creation and the standardization of emojis deal with the transduction
of the message (e.g. the “Face with Tears of Joy”) across two different coding systems: the inter-
nal code defined as hexadecimal (e.g. 1F602) and the glyph that is its graphic representation
(Unicode Consortium 2015a). While the first has been fully standardized by the Unicode encod-
ing system, which means that for each conceptual image a unique identification number is fea-
tured, the graphical form of such a code varies with the implementation of emojis across different
platforms. Indeed, as one can see in Figure 6, the representation of the Unicode character 1F602,
named the “Face with Tears of Joy” features a range of visual interpretations.


Figure 6. Unicode Emoji Chart, (a selection) ©Unicode http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

The version of the 1F602 glyph chosen by the Oxford Dictionaries to indicate the ‘word of the
year” is the one designed by Apple, widely recognized as a de-facto standard (Nasser/Benenson
et al. 2013). It is a visual representation that, as we shall see in the next paragraphs, intertextually
links emojis to emoticons and to the famous symbol of the “smiley” face.

5. The “Smiley” and its optimistic commercial ethos

The history of the “smiley” face is “a narrative that encompasses big business, popular culture
and anti-establishment sentiment […] and a series of bitter copyright issues” (Piercy 2013). How-
ever, it is largely accepted that the original version of the sign (see Figure 7) was created in 1963
18

by Harvey Ross Ball, an American freelance designer who was commissioned by the Worcester
Mutual Insurance Company to create a new logo in order to “raise morale among the employees
of an insurance company after a series of difficult mergers and acquisitions” (Stamp 2013).
The image was reproduced on button badges for their employees to wear and to distribute to
clients to illustrate the new “service with a smile” company ethos (Piercy 2013). The structur-
al connection between the original “smiley” face and pin-back buttons as sites of display was
meant to reinforce the illocutionary force of the message, since badge pins – a US patent dated
1896 – are natively advertising media that were originally used for political slogans.

Figure 7. The original smiley face as designed by Harvey Ball © The World Smiley Foundation

Political buttons have been used in the United States since 1789, when George Washington’s sup-
porters wore buttons imprinted with a slogan during the first presidential inauguration, while the
first campaign buttons were used in 1824 (Badgeomania 2014). However, it is only at the begin-
ning of the Twentieth Century, that US companies started to exploit the communicative potential
of these patented pin-buttons, which functioned as billboards displaying persuasive messages in
the form of slogans or pictures.
Going back to the “smiley” button, it gained popularity at the beginning of the 1970s when,
combined with the saying “Have a Happy Day”, achieved its iconic status and became the “ubiq-
uitous icon of post-Vietnam America” (Piercy 2013). Through a chain of subsequent resemioti-
zations (Kress 2000, Iedema 2001) the image of the smiley face has featured a range of material
realizations from pin-buttons to t-shirts, from pillows and posters to ecstasy pills according to the
variation of the affordance of modes, of their materiality and of their grounding social, cultural
and aesthetic practices. Contextually, its meaning has changed, varying from the original optimis-
tic message of the Worcester Insurance Company, to become a commercialized logo, to an ironic
fashion statement, to a symbol of rave culture. However, the “smiley” appears to primarily em-
body the spirit of American capitalism and, more precisely, the optimistic commercial ethos we
mentioned above (Stamp 2013). And it is with this connotation that we find it bloodstained and
critiqued on the cover of the first number of the cult comic book series Watchmen, published by
DC Comics (Moore et al. 1986-1987).
 19

Figure 8. Cover of the first number of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, 1986 © DC Comics

As regards its physical appearance, the “smiley” features a rounded form, which was probably
functional to its original material realization as a pin button and that recalls the conceptual sym-
bolic representation of a human face. The absence of perspective and the frontal angle ‘demand’
the viewers to enter into a friendly relationship (Kress/van Leeuwen 2006 [1996]: 145). The
friendship of the invitation is visually marked by the expression of the abstract face, where the
smiling mouth (especially in Ball’s original design) represents the most salient element in terms
of proportions. Another marker of happiness is the color, a bright fully saturated yellow that re-
inforces the ‘positive’ message carried by the mouth. Indeed, as regards the psychological and
cultural meaning of this color, van Leeuwen – quoting Faber Birren (1961: 143) – affirms “‘mo-
dern Americans’ see yellow as ‘cheerful, inspiring, vital, celestial’ and relate it to ‘high spirit’
and ‘health’” (2011: 56).
Such a semiotic configuration creates a visual form of direct address that asks the viewer to en-
ter into a relation of social affinity, thus implicitly demanding to share the same attitude and, prob-
ably, also to adhere to the same set of values. Indeed, it is a form of visual reciprocity which is
functional to the strengthening of ‘mutual’ relationship and affinity between the viewers and the
represented subjects that Kress and van Leeuwen (2006 [1996]: 118), along with Belting (1990:
57), date back to the devotional use of holy images in thirteen-century monasteries.
As regards Apple’s design of the emoji smiling faces (see Figure 6), their rounded shape and
their color recall Ball’s smiley, and also the shades (that can be clearly seen in Figure 1) suggest a
corporeity that reminds of the pin-button, as if the most relevant meaning were materially fixed
in the original pin badge. At the same time, salience appears to be given to both the mouth and the
eyes, thus embodying, in this latest digital realization of the smiley, the mashing-up of two differ-
ent and culturally connoted loci of facial expressivity. It is a combination that can be potentially
related to the ‘convergence’ of discursive communities belonging to different cultural areas, such
as US computer scientist user groups, Japanese otaku and shōjo subcultures, American Sci-Fi and
manga/anime fandoms in the realm of global digital language, in the wake of subsequent trans-
pacific exchanges. It is an intertextual chain of semiosis that – as outlined in the next paragraph
– starts with emoticons and ends up in the creation of emojis.

6. Emoticons, Kaomoji and Emojis

Despite the resemblance of the word “emoji” to the English term “emoticon” (composed by the
words “emotion” and “icon”), which – according to the Oxford Dictionaries Blog has favored its
20

memorability – emojis are different from emoticons since the latter indicate facial expressions
that are created using keyboard characters, while emojis are – as we have seen – pictorial signs.
In addition, the cultural origin of the two items of digitally mediated communication is different.
As a matter of fact, while emoticons stemmed out of the community of US computer scientist
user groups, the creation of kaomoji – that are Japanese emoticons and the ‘ancestors’ of Kurita’s
emojis – can be traced back to youth culture, in particular to teenage female subcultures (shōjo)
and to obsessive fans of manga, otaku (Azuma 2010 [2001]).
The first use of an emoticon in a computer message was reported by professor Scott E. Fahl-
man, who was – as he affirms – the first to use a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis to
represent a smiley face in 1982 (Krohn 2004). He posted the graphic representation of a facial ex-
pression in a message to an online electronic bulletin board during a discussion “about the limits
of online humor” and about the necessity “to denote comments meant to be taken lightly” (Lov-
ering 2007). In his message – the transcription of which can be read below1 – he pointed out the
necessity to give computer users a way to mark “jokes”.
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(

Emoticons, thus, were created with the explicit function of being “humor indicators”, which are
fundamental – as the New Hackers Dictionary affirms – in on-line forums where the “lack of ver-
bal and visual cues can cause what were intended to be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise
non-100%-serious comments to be badly misinterpreted” (Raymond 1993).
The reference to humor is also culturally connoted since humor and, more precisely, irony –
which involves playing with form – is a defining feature of hacker subculture that “love[s] pranks,
clever programming tricks, toys and games” (Isaacson 2014: 201). Indeed, hackers celebrate val-
ues such as creativity, fun, informality, personal engagement, liberty, gaming and code mastery.
Another structural feature of computer culture – which is one of the four pillars of geek culture
(Konzack 2014: 59) – is the love of science fiction and fantasy and the partaking in the related
fandoms, as Stewart Brand described in his Rolling Stone article dated 1972, “one of the first and
still one of the most quoted descriptions of the Bay area computer scene” (Turner 2006: 116).
It seems that emoticons themselves can be traced back to the discursive practices of sci-fi
and fantasy fandoms; indeed, according to the astrophysics professor and science fiction author,
Gregory Benford (1996), “most of the Net’s ‘emoticons’ […] had appeared in fanzines by the
1950s”. Such fandoms were mostly male communities (Jenkins 2013 [1992]) who used typed-on-
paper emoticons like Fahlman’s digital ones as visual clues of ironic adherence or disagreement.
In Japan, before the advent of commercial Internet that occurred in 1993, emoticons were fa-
miliar to the community of academic users who were connected to American and European uni-
versities and research institutes via a non-commercial network, JUNET (Japanese Unix Network).
On the other hand, general public users, who were connected through commercial networks, start-
ed to elaborate their own form of expressing emotions using keyboards and drawing on pre-exist-
ing narrative forms. As a matter of fact, many of otaku’s designed face marks (literally, kaomoji)
feature elements of manga visual style (Wallestad 2013: 8). More in details, they were devel-
oped in the sub-community of “early and heavy users of personal computers” that were typically
“young males with narrowly focused interests, such as computers or comics” and that were re-
ferred to as otaku, the colloquial for “geek” (Katsuno/Yano 2002: 201). In this initial stage, ka-
omoji were inserted at the end of the name, as if they were part of the signature. With the advent
of the commercial use of the Internet in Japan, kaomoji started to spread beyond the boundaries

1 For the complete retrieval of the entire discussion thread see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm (De-
cember 2015).
 21

of otaku subculture. However, as Katsuno and Yano highlight (2002: 211), the true populariza-
tion of kaomoji “rested in the hands of the most popular pagers in Japan and female high-school
students”. Some scholars (Sugimoto/Levin 2000) have connected the Japanese female youth use
of kaomoji in text messages on pagers and, later on, on mobiles to the emergence of new literary
practices and to the rise of “kitten writing” in which women use kawaii (cute) culture (Kinsella
1995) to create new vernacular forms of language (Hjorth 2009: 68).
The contrast between American and Japanese face marks is mainly expressed by the direction
of the symbol, since the emoticons are read at perpendicular angles with the words – i.e. : ) –,
while kaomoji are read in line with words, like (^_^); and by the main locus of expressivity, that in
America is the mouth (hence, smiley), while in Japan is the eyes (Katsuno/ Yano 2002: 206). We
may also argue that, as far as the pragmatic use of such symbols is concerned, originally the two
elements of computer-mediated communication (CMC) features different purposes: as a matter of
fact, the main aim of Fahlman’s emoticons was to provide the meta-communicative frame ac-
cording to which messages have to be decoded; while kaomoji appear to natively present a visual,
conceptual and diegetic function.
Indeed, studies in CMC suggest that – also in contemporary digital discourse – emoticons are
used primarily not as markers of emotion (Baron 2000, Crystal 2001, Walther/D’Addario 2004),
but as indicators of the pragmatic illocutionary force of the utterances they are co-textually re-
lated to (Markman/ Ōshima 2007; Dresner/Herring 2010). It is the same function envisioned by
Fahlman when he proposed to use emoticons as ‘irony markers’.
On the other hand, kaomoji – being rooted in manga visual language and in kanji writing –
appear to be more performative and expressive than emoticons since they can function as both
“punctuating devices and potentially units of larger meaning” (Markman/Ōshima 2007: 14).
As Katsuno and Yano (2007) explain, kaomoji feature a quite complex structure and may incorpo-
rate words, movements and onomatopoeic sounds like single frames of manga. Such a complex-
ity allows kaomoji to stand on their own and to express meanings working better than the verbal
code.
The first set of emojis directly stems out of the discursive tradition of Japanese emoticons,
since, as we have seen, Shigetara Kurita developed them in order to facilitate the otherwise com-
plex creation of kaomoji symbols on keyboards and thus overcome the limits imposed by the
modal affordances of mobile phones (Adami/Kress 2010).
Their use as narrative instruments is evident in many examples such as the already quoted Ben-
enson’s ‘emojified’ version of Moby Dick or the emoji translation of President Obama’s State of
the Union Address 2015 published by The Guardian-US (2015). However, the analyses of Chiusa-
roli (2015) Nasser, Benenson et al. (2013) and Stark and Crawford (2015) show that, when emojis
are used in global digital discourse (that is not in the specific cultural context out of which they
originated), they are able to convey common and ‘universal’ meanings, while their full seman-
tic and pragmatic realization is highly dependent on the presence of a verbal co-text/context.

7. Conclusions
The aim of the present article was the decoding of the semantic and semiotic layers of the “Face
with Tears of Joy” emoji, which was chosen by the Oxford Dictionaries as the “Word of the
Year” 2015. In order to map the history of the sign, a socio-semiotic perspective has been ad-
opted and the concept of translation as “transduction” has been used to trace the movement of
meaning across sign systems, with a special critical focus on the cultural contexts out of which
they originated.
The author maintains that this ‘pictographic word’ is to be seen as a marker of the merging of
Japanese and American cultures in the discursive practices of geek communities. In particular, she
argues that such a sign can be defined a Japan-America mash-up since it presents traces of the
two different cultural traditions as well as of the subsequent waves of transpacific exchanges.
22

Indeed, the “Face with Tears of Joy” that was selected by the Oxford Dictionaries is Apple’s pro-
prietary design (which is the de-facto standard of contemporary digital discourse) and presents the
fusion of manga visual style and Japanese kaomoji with the tradition of pin-button 1960s smiley
faces celebrating the optimistic commercial ethos of US capitalism. The intertwining of the two
cultural traditions has occurred primarily thanks to the exchanges of the discursive practices of
computer culture communities, which are deeply intertwined with the practices of geek com-
munities such as sci-fi, fantasy and comics fandom, now become popular with the spreading of
digital discourse.
As a matter of fact, the flow of cultural and subcultural material between America and Japan
has created a global postmodern culture where aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual traditions influ-
ence each other across national boundaries (Murakami 2005, Kelts 2006, Tatsumi 2006). In par-
ticular, such transcultural processes have given rise to a ‘pop-cultural fanaticism’ that has now
become mainstream because of a key generation of people ‘raised on a diet’ of transpacific cultu-
ral products (Rivera 2008: 137).
It appears thus that the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year here analyzed being – as it is – an
example of such an intertextual magma, could be considered a potential component of the “data-
base fantasyscape”, the virtual ‘repository’ theorized by Brian Ruh (2014) that, merging Azuma’s
database concept (2007, 2010 [2001]) and Napier’s idea of fantasyscape (2007), aims to descri-
be the flow of anime and manga in a transmedia and transnational context. Such an interpretation
would conceptualize emojis, like anime and manga characters, as just another global postmodern
‘tile’ people may gather in order to create their own DIY narrations.
In addition, the transduction of Kurita’s emojis to the Unicode encoding system and the cre-
ation of the new global standard for the Japanese signs suggest a process of ‘universalization’
which is deeply imbued with American cultural values, a feature that appears to be distinctive
of digital discourse (Moschini 2013).

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr Gianluca di Fratta for his precious supervision on Japanese culture. Many
thanks also go to the reviewer who invited me to read Brian Ruh’s work on the database fanta-
syscape.

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