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Studio Ghibli adds The Boy and the Heron stamps to Line messaging app in Japan

Express your emotions with the help of Ghibli’s feathered anime characters.

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Keyboard app shares most common emoji by country, Japan’s are completely different from others

A case of cultural differences or linguistic ones?

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New Pokémon Line app message stamps raise money for children in Japan’s disaster-struck regions

Artists from around the country took part in the project, which sees Pikachu saying thank you in forty different ways.

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Hadoken! The LINE stickers we’ve all been waiting for: Street Fighter II

LINE is Japan’s most popular instant messaging platform and it came to its place on top via cute emoji “stickers.” But maybe you’ve had enough of the cutesy bears and sparkling hearts. Maybe you need to let out some emoji anger when your girlfriend is being a bit clingy with her texts. Fear not! The LINE stickers of your dreams have been released and they are just as tough, and occasionally gruesome, as you want them to be! Welcome into the ring, Street Fighter II!

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What’s that emoji? Let’s take a look at Japanese culture with these texting emoticons!【Part 1】

LINE is a free instant-messaging and voice-call application that’s almost a necessity in Asia; for many, it’s cheaper than texting through their mobile plan, and the app’s astounding collection of oversized emoticons called stickers and sticons (short for sticker emoticons) makes chatting with your friends that much more fun and cute! However, Japanese users recently noticed a puzzling sticon that had found its way into the pool. The image, which we’ll be looking at later, is based on a worldwide fad that didn’t seem to catch on in Japan, so it’s no wonder that people were confused.

This prompted me to wonder, “Which emoji are gathering dust because some people don’t quite know what they are or what they mean?” Since emoji (literally meaning “pictographs”) originated in Japan and later became incorporated into Unicode, it makes sense that many are emblematic of that country’s culture. After asking a few friends, choices were narrowed down to the above six emoticons, available on most smartphones. In Part 1 we’ll be examining the three food-based emoticons, so if you’re not familiar with that geometry lesson on a stick or the origins of that brown circle, read on after the jump!

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