I think kaomoji have been a thing in Japan even before unicode was invented. The Japanese encodings and IME (input method esitors) allowed them to type a wide variety of characters, punctuation and symbols that aren’t available in most western encodings, so I feel like the Japanese folks had a head start on creative use of typography.

For example, if you want an eyeball you can just type “do” (degrees), and the IME will pull up °, and “omega” gives you ω, so it’s pretty easy to make (°ω°).