Answer: Kaomoji

The earliest Western emoticons were simple two-character affairs that required the user to read them sideways, with a tilted head, to see them in their true form—emoticons such as 🙂 and :p represented faces in this fashion.

In Japan, however, concurrent with the development of Western emoticons, an entire class of emoticons that could be read without tilting your head arose. These emoticons, called kaomoji (literally “face characters”) could be read in a regular horizontal position. At their most basic, they look like (*_*), but thanks to the use of Japanese characters, simple faces like (o.0) have evolved into more sophisticated designs like (^ム^) or ¯\_(ツ)_/¯