Kaomoji
Japanese text faces read the right way up, where the eyes carry the emotion instead of the mouth.
The Western emoticon lies on its side and lets the mouth do the talking, :-); kaomoji stand upright and emote with the eyes: (^_^), (;_;), (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻. The name means roughly "face characters", and the earliest examples are usually dated to Japanese online forums in the mid-1980s.
Japanese character sets offered a far bigger palette than ASCII — kana, Cyrillic letters, box-drawing characters and full-width symbols — so kaomoji could sprout arms, props and whole little scenes. They are a close relative of the larger tradition of Shift JIS art and spread to Western forums with Unicode, where the table-flipping face has become an international way of saying you give up.