Victory with a happy dude - V(^^)V

There is one area where Japan is lightyears ahead of the competition in terms of progress and innovation; the invention and use of smileys and images in e-mails. I've touched a bit upon this earlier in a post that seem to attract almost daily spam posts (here). Personally I have since long ago decided to not try fight the tide here and just go along with it, embracing this custom.

Of course it's easy to use characters such as a frog singing in the rain (click the picture, it's one of my favorite ones, it can be used to illustrate anything), crying pigs, blinking christmas trees and whatever it is you fancy on modern mobile phones that has all of these images pre-equipped. But the true level of innovation shines through in how Japanese people manage to put together smileys illustrating a wide range of emotions through simple characters.

But not only this, last week as mailed a question to Cpt. Awkward about a small thing that had been bugging me a bit (for some reason I didn't completely trust that he had taken care of it) and I got a reply back stating that things were in order and he had taken care of it, and at the end he put in the following characters:

V(^^)V

I'm not completely sure, but I think that this combination of characters are supposed to convey a happy dude doing the victory marks with his/hers fingers. Considering that Cpt. Awkward is a balding gray-looking middle management Salaryman close to retirement (don't get me wrong, he's a nice guy in that kind of Christian Bale vs. camera crew guy relationship way) I found it both amusing and kinda creepy at the same time that even he uses these type of smileys...