About Kaomojis — Editorial Policy, Data Sources & Team
Kaomojis (kaomojis.jp) is a free information service dedicated to bringing Japanese kaomoji culture to the world. We catalog over 61,000 kaomoji organized by emotion, event, and scene, available in 12 languages. This page details our editors, policies, data sources, quality standards, and contact information.
Mission
Our mission is to become the undisputed number-one resource for kaomoji worldwide.
We aim to reduce friction in digital communication through expressive text-based emotion — building warmer, more human online relationships.
We monetize via ads and affiliate links. We will never charge users or gate features behind paywalls. Every kaomoji is free forever.
Team
Editorial team: Kaomojis Editors (based in Japan)
Founded: July 2025
Contact: [email protected]
X (Twitter): @kaomojis_jp (Japanese) / @kaomojis_eng (English)
Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan (the kaomojis.jp domain requires a verified Japanese residency or entity)
Editorial Policy
1. Copyright respect: We never publish character-based or trademarked content. Only original or generic motifs (animals, nature, food, symbols, messages) are cataloged.
2. Full multilingual coverage: Every kaomoji is annotated with usage examples, keywords, and cultural notes in 12 languages (ja/en/zh/zh-TW/es/ko/hi/pt/fr/ru/de/id).
3. Political neutrality: We do not add event kaomoji tied to wars or politically charged national anniversaries.
4. Seasonal appropriateness: Out-of-season content (Valentines in 1-2, Christmas in 11-12, Halloween in 9-10) is hidden outside its window.
5. Continuous updates: Content additions, keyword refinement, and translation audits run daily.
Data Sources
The primary seed corpus comes from public kaomoji collections that have circulated in Japanese BBS culture for decades. Kaomoji were born in 1986 on Japan's ASCII NET and have always been shared, remixed, and redistributed as a cultural commons.
Many kaomoji — especially those for birthdays, seasonal events, and specific emotion genres — were freshly composed by our editors.
Every kaomoji is hashed with SHA-256 at ingest to prevent exact duplicates in the catalog.
Multilingual keywords start as AI-assisted drafts; major languages (Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese) undergo human review.
Quality Standards
Deduplication: SHA-256 exact matching + manual category overlap review. About 8% of candidate additions are rejected as duplicates.
Scoring: dynamic score based on copy count, favorite count, and dwell time. Used for ranking, popular sections, and related-kaomoji suggestions.
Translation audit: scripts/audit-translations.mjs --strict runs weekly to measure untranslated rate. Target is under 5% per language.
Copyright filter: new submissions are auto-screened for character/brand names and for Braille-range characters (U+2800+, which break rendering on LINE/Discord).
Update Cadence
Kaomoji data: multiple times per week to daily (bulk additions, category upkeep, translation improvements)
Feature releases: nearly daily deploys (changelog spans Phase 1 through Phase 554+)
Translation audit: weekly (scripts/audit-translations.mjs)
Security & dependency updates: weekly
SEO meta optimization: monthly or more (continuous improvement via A/B-test framework)
Contact & Contributing
Request a new kaomoji: use the /request page to submit ideas.
Bug reports & suggestions: [email protected]
Translation feedback: we warmly welcome corrections from native speakers of any of our 12 supported languages.
Developers: our free public REST API (/api/v1/kaomojis) is available for Discord bots, keyboard apps, and other integrations without an API key.
Meet Kaomo, Our Mascot
Kaomo is a little sticky-note spirit born in the margins of our catalog. Having no face of its own, it borrows a face from our 61,000+ kaomoji each day to match the mood — because the right face at the right moment makes communication a little softer. Its signature face is 「・ᴗ・」.
Kaomo 「・ᴗ・」 →Last updated: 2026-04-15 (Phase 554)
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Kaomojis.jp free to use?
- Yes. Every kaomoji, symbol, and template on Kaomojis.jp is completely free to copy, paste, and use — with no sign-up, account, or payment required. The site is supported by ads, so you can browse and copy as many text faces as you like at no cost.
- Where do the kaomoji on Kaomojis.jp come from?
- Our kaomoji are collected from public Japanese internet culture and traditional text-emoticon conventions, then organized by hand into emotions, animals, events, and themes. We use only original or generic motifs (faces, animals, nature, food, symbols) and never copyrighted characters.
- Can I use these kaomoji commercially?
- Yes. Kaomoji are made of plain Unicode characters and are not copyrighted, so you can use them freely in both personal and commercial projects — social posts, apps, products, and marketing. No attribution or license is needed.
- Who is behind Kaomojis.jp?
- Kaomojis.jp is run by a small, dedicated team focused on Japanese kaomoji (text emoticons). We curate, categorize, and maintain a collection of 61,000+ kaomoji and keep it updated, following an editorial policy that avoids copyrighted, violent, and out-of-season content.
- How many kaomoji does Kaomojis.jp have?
- Kaomojis.jp hosts a collection of 61,000+ kaomoji, organized by emotion, animal, event, and theme across 12 languages. New kaomoji and landing pages are added regularly, and a live ranking shows the most-copied faces.