Japanese emojis in the 1990s were inspired by kaomojis - so really the evolution was not down to smiley emoticons, but kaomojis! Other countries utilise accents and characters in their keyboards ...
A simple $0.99 iPhone app made by Richard Henry (product designer at Quora), Kaomoji contains 1,000 Japanese-style emoticons organized in 28 categories such as Happy, Sad, Evil, Love, Cats, Dogs, ...