Japanese emoticons. Adapted to their culture. According to The New York Times
(August 12, 1996), the Japanese are using emoticons even more than Westerners. In
American computers, each letter or punctuation mark is represented by one byte, a string
of eight zeroes and ones, allowing for 256 possible characters. But Japanese computers
use two bytes for each character, to allow for enough combinations to represent all the
kanji. For punctuation marks, Japanese users can choose between single-byte and doublebyte characters, with the latter being wider or appearing double spaced. A double-byte
smiley ( ---- ) is used to convey a stronger feeling than a single-byte one and often merits
a line of its own in the message