What exactly is a kaomoji?

A kaomoji is a face made out of text characters that you read upright, the Japanese cousin of the sideways Western smiley. Where :) tilts your head, a kaomoji like (^_^) or (╥﹏╥) faces you head-on. They are assembled from ordinary Unicode letters, punctuation and symbols, so the happy face (｡♥‿♥｡) is literally a string you can select and retype, not a single emoji codepoint.

How do I type the shrug ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ myself?

The shrug is macron + backslash + underscore + (ツ) + underscore + forward-slash + macron, where ツ is the Japanese katakana tsu. Typing it by hand is fiddly because of the macron and the katakana, which is the whole reason this picker exists: search shrug, click the face, and the exact string is on your clipboard. In code you escape the backslash, so a JS literal is the awkward-looking ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.

How is a kaomoji different from an emoji?

An emoji such as the grinning face is a single Unicode codepoint that each platform draws with its own colorful artwork, so it can look different on iPhone, Android and Windows. A kaomoji is plain text, several normal characters in a row, rendered in your current font with no color. That means a kaomoji never gets redrawn by the platform and reads identically as long as the font has the glyphs, which is why it suits commit messages, code and monospace terminals.

Where can I paste a kaomoji?

Anywhere that accepts text, because a kaomoji is just text. Drop it into Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, X, a git commit message, a code comment, a YouTube title, a game username, an email signature or a terminal prompt. Since there is no special emoji codepoint involved, it works in plain-text places where real emoji are stripped or unsupported, like older chat clients and many command-line tools.

Will a kaomoji show up as garbled boxes for other people?

Mostly no, but it depends on the font. The common ASCII pieces like (^_^) render everywhere. Faces that lean on katakana such as ツ, or on box-drawing parts like ┻━┻ in the table flip, need a font that contains those glyphs, otherwise a reader sees a tofu box. Most modern systems ship fonts that cover them, so on current phones and browsers the faces in this picker display correctly for the vast majority of people.

Can I search in English for a Japanese emoticon?

Yes. Every face in the picker carries both English and Chinese tags, so typing shrug, bear, table flip, wink, cry or angry filters the list instantly even though the faces themselves are language-neutral symbols. You can also pick a mood category if you would rather browse than search, and combine the two to narrow a category down with a keyword.

Drop a shrug into a Slack reply

A teammate asks why the staging build is slow and you genuinely do not know yet. Instead of a paragraph of hedging, search shrug, copy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and send it. The face carries the tone, you keep typing the real answer underneath, and nobody had to remember the macron plus katakana keystrokes that make the shrug so annoying to type.

Flip the table in a game chat

You just lost a ranked match to a lag spike. Pick the angry category, grab (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, and paste it into the post-game chat. Because it is plain text it shows up in the game client where real emoji often get stripped, and the box-drawing pieces render cleanly on any modern font so your teammates actually see the table go flying.

Add a face to a git commit message

Commit messages are pure text in a monospace terminal, so colorful emoji are a gamble but a kaomoji is safe. Tag a relieved bugfix with (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) or a defeated one with (╥﹏╥). It reads the same in git log, on the web diff and in the terminal, since the font draws the characters directly instead of a platform redrawing an emoji.

Decorate a username or video title

Many platforms let usernames and titles contain Unicode but reject emoji. A cute kaomoji like (｡♥‿♥｡) or ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ slips through where a heart emoji would be filtered, giving a profile or thumbnail a bit of personality. Search the cute or animals category, click, and paste straight into the name field.

Kaomoji Picker — Japanese Emoticons + Shrug Copy Paste

Browse 120+ Japanese emoticons by mood, search in English, click to copy the shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and friends

Runs locally
Category Text
Best for Removing repetitive cleanup work from everyday writing and operations.

120 kaomojiClick any face to copy it to your clipboard.

What this tool does

A kaomoji picker for the Japanese-style text faces people actually use: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, (｡♥‿♥｡), ( •_•) and over a hundred more. Unlike emoji, a kaomoji is built from plain Unicode characters, so it pastes into any text box, chat, code comment, commit message, terminal or game name without turning into a colorful glyph or a missing-box tofu. Pick a mood category like happy, sad, angry, love, surprised, cute or animals, or type a keyword such as shrug, bear, cry or wink to filter live. Click any face and it copies straight to your clipboard with a quick confirmation. Your search term and category save into the URL so a shared link reopens the exact same view. Everything runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded, and the whole thing is one small file.

Tool details

Input: Form fields; The page exposes text boxes, numeric controls, file pickers, or structured inputs depending on the tool.
Output: Live result + Copy; The result area focuses on usable output, with copy, download, or preview actions when supported.
Privacy: Browser-side processing; The main tool logic does not call an external API, so inputs normally stay in the current tab.
Save / share: Shareable URL state; Key settings are encoded in the URL so another person can reopen the same setup.
Performance budget: Initial JS <= 9 KB; No WASM budget is declared, keeping the tool quick to open on mobile.
Best fit: Text · Content Creator; Category and role tags drive related tools, internal links, and quick fit checks.

How to use

1. Input

Paste or drop your content into the tool panel.
2. Process

Click the button. All processing is local in your browser.
3. Copy / Download

Copy the result or download to disk in one click.

How Kaomoji Picker fits into your work

Use it to clean, compare, reshape, or extract plain text before it goes into a document, CMS, spreadsheet, or prompt.

Text jobs

Removing repetitive cleanup work from everyday writing and operations.
Making text easier to compare, paste, publish, or feed into another tool.
Working with content locally when the text is private or unfinished.

Text checks

Scan for unintended whitespace, duplicate lines, and lost punctuation.
For long text, test the first few lines before applying the whole change.
Copy the final output only after checking the preview.

Good next steps

These links move the current task into a more complete workflow.

Real-world use cases

Drop a shrug into a Slack reply
A teammate asks why the staging build is slow and you genuinely do not know yet. Instead of a paragraph of hedging, search shrug, copy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and send it. The face carries the tone, you keep typing the real answer underneath, and nobody had to remember the macron plus katakana keystrokes that make the shrug so annoying to type.
Flip the table in a game chat
You just lost a ranked match to a lag spike. Pick the angry category, grab (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, and paste it into the post-game chat. Because it is plain text it shows up in the game client where real emoji often get stripped, and the box-drawing pieces render cleanly on any modern font so your teammates actually see the table go flying.
Add a face to a git commit message
Commit messages are pure text in a monospace terminal, so colorful emoji are a gamble but a kaomoji is safe. Tag a relieved bugfix with (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) or a defeated one with (╥﹏╥). It reads the same in git log, on the web diff and in the terminal, since the font draws the characters directly instead of a platform redrawing an emoji.
Decorate a username or video title
Many platforms let usernames and titles contain Unicode but reject emoji. A cute kaomoji like (｡♥‿♥｡) or ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ slips through where a heart emoji would be filtered, giving a profile or thumbnail a bit of personality. Search the cute or animals category, click, and paste straight into the name field.

Common pitfalls

Trying to hand-type the shrug character by character. The macron and the katakana tsu are not on a normal keyboard, so people end up pasting a broken ¯_(ツ)_/¯ with a missing slash or wrong dashes. Copy the whole string from one source instead of rebuilding it.
Pasting a katakana or box-drawing kaomoji into a system with a stripped-down font. Faces using ツ or ┻━┻ can show as tofu boxes on very old devices. If your audience runs ancient clients, prefer the pure ASCII faces like (^_^) that every font covers.
Forgetting to escape the backslash when putting a shrug in code or JSON. A raw ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in a string literal eats the underscore as an escape; you need ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ so the backslash survives to the output.

Privacy

The whole picker is static text plus a little JavaScript that runs in your browser tab. The kaomoji list ships with the page, copying uses your browser clipboard, and nothing you click or search is sent anywhere or logged. The only thing that leaves the page is what you choose: the search term and category are written into the URL so a shared link reopens the same view, which means a link pasted into chat reveals which mood you were browsing. The faces you copy are never recorded.

FAQ

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Kaomoji Picker — Japanese Emoticons + Shrug Copy Paste

What this tool does

Tool details

How to use

1. Input

2. Process

3. Copy / Download

How Kaomoji Picker fits into your work

Text jobs

Text checks

Good next steps

Real-world use cases

Drop a shrug into a Slack reply

Flip the table in a game chat

Add a face to a git commit message

Decorate a username or video title

Common pitfalls

Privacy

FAQ

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