![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soranews24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2025\/07\/ER-1.jpg?w=640\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Multi-country study has one element in every nation\u2019s top five emoji, but not Japan\u2019s<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n In Japan, yearly observances such as Wagashi Day<\/a>, Good Bath Day<\/a>, and Boobs Day<\/a> are always a source of fun for aficionados of their particular themes. However, Japan isn\u2019t the only country with such quasi-holidays. In fact, some such celebrations are global affairs, such as World Emoji Day<\/strong>, which falls on July 17.<\/p>\n In observance of World Emoji Day, Baidu Japan<\/strong>, the Japanese division of Chinese tech firm Baidu, maker of the Simeji<\/strong> emoji keyboard app, conducted a tally of the most-used emoji among Simeji users across 16 different countries, Japan, the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Argentina, Mexico, Iraq, Egypt, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and India, during the first half of 2025<\/strong>.<\/p>\n When everything was added up, the most-used emoji across that entire user base was\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2026this specific crying face<\/strong>. Those twin tear cascades were the most commonly used emoji in 12 of the 16 countries, including Japan, the U.S., and the U.K. What\u2019s more, out of the four remaining countries, three of them, France, Iraq, and Egypt, had different crying faces as their favorites, with Russia the only country with no tears in its number-one emoji.<\/p>\n \u25bc Top five emoji for Japan, U.S., U.K., and France (first row), Russia, Spain, Italy, and Turkey (second row), Argentina, Mexico, Iraq, and Egypt (third row), and Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and India (fourth row)<\/p>\n So why is the As further proof of how versatile crying emoji are, aside from Argentina and Mexico every country had at least two in their top five, and some had three. But while crying faces showed up across the board, Japan\u2019s top five results were unique in the three different ways<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Japan\u2019s number two and three emoji didn\u2019t show up in any other country\u2019s top five<\/strong>. It\u2019s not hard to imagine the reason for the disparity with And the third way Japan\u2019s results are unique? It\u2019s the only country with no hearts, either as stand-alone emoji or as elements (such as a face with hearts for eyes) in its top five<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The easy explanation here is that Japanese people are less likely to directly say \u201cI love you\u201d than people in many other cultures, but there\u2019s a little more to it than that<\/strong>. While people in some countries may use heart emoji to express familial love, in Japan they\u2019re almost exclusively used to express romantic love. A Japanese grandma, for example, isn\u2019t likely to send her out-of-prefecture grandchild a text that says \u201cHappy birthday, sweetie! Grandma misses you Source: PR Times<\/a><\/em> Multi-country study has one element in every nation\u2019s top five emoji, but not Japan\u2019s. In Japan, yearly observances such as Wagashi Day, Good Bath Day, and Boobs Day are always…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soranews24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2025\/07\/ER-2.jpg?w=264\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soranews24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2025\/07\/ER-3.jpg?w=640\")
<\/p>\n![\"\ud83d\ude2d\"](\"https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/16.0.1\/72x72\/1f62d.png\")
so widely used across different regions, languages, and communication cultures?<\/strong> Baidu Japan thinks it\u2019s because of how versatile that exact emoji is. The free-flowing tears are a strong show of emotion, but the overall expression (the shape and position of the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth) and pretty noncommittal. Those could be tears of joy, laughter, gratitude, empathy, or sadness, depending on the context, or even some mix of those that\u2019s hard to convey in words, making an emoji an especially effective and appealing way to send those sentiments to somebody on the other end of a text chat. Some of that also applies to the crying faces that were the top picks for France, Iraq, and Egypt, but the expressions on their number-one emoji seem to be either smiling or wincing, which sort of limits how useful they are for expressing more tender or sympathetic feelings.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soranews24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2025\/07\/ER-4.jpg?w=640\")
<\/p>\n![\"\ud83d\udca6\"](\"https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/16.0.1\/72x72\/1f4a6.png\")
. In Japan, stylized sweat drops have been used as a symbol for hurried, panicked, or emphatic action in manga\/anime and graphic art for several decades, but it\u2019s not uncommon for the emoji to be used\/seen as a symbol of a different sort of bodily fluid among online communities in other countries, one with much narrower situational applicability. As for the double exclamation points, they don\u2019t have any unique significance in Japan, but their popularity could be related to how one of the most common ways to show surprise in Japanese is to let out an elongated \u201cE\u2014-eeeee,\u201d with a rising intonation. However, that same sound, but with a dropping intonation, instead indicates disapproval or doubt that what the other person said is true, and since intonation isn\u2019t something that can be conveyed in Japanese writing, using an emoji to show that you\u2019re surprised is sometimes a safer choice.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n![\"\u2764\"](\"https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/16.0.1\/72x72\/2764.png\")
,\u201d nor would said grandkid respond with, \u201cThanks, Grandma! I miss you too .\u201d With a narrower range of usable situations, it\u2019s not surprising that Japan uses fewer heart emoji, but it doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that Japanese people don\u2019t care about love (after all, they\u2019ve got multiple words for it<\/a>).<\/p>\n
\nTop image: Pakutaso<\/a><\/em>
\nInsert images: PR Times<\/em>
\n\u25cf Want to hear about SoraNews24\u2019s latest articles as soon as they\u2019re published? Follow us on Facebook<\/a> and Twitter<\/a>!<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"