Japanese Texting Slang: Kusa, Ri, and the Legendary “Ojisan Style”

Three facts about Japanese texting, up front. Laughter is written as grass: 草くさ. “Got it” has been compressed to a single character: り. And Japan's most famous texting style belongs to middle-aged men — so recognizable it has its own name, and so beloved it became a national running joke.

None of this appears in textbooks, because texting Japanese is its own dialect — with its own spelling of laughter, its own economy of effort, and its own generational accents. Reading it is a separate small skill from reading Japanese.

This guide decodes the essentials: the abbreviations you'll actually receive, the grass, the surprisingly emotional politics of the period, and a full anatomy of the legendary おじさん構文おじさんこうぶん — “ojisan style”. One note before we start: this is a field guide for reading. What you should type yourself is a shorter list, and we'll mark it clearly.

Texting Japanese runs on compression

Young Japanese texting is ruthlessly efficient. 了解りょうかい (“understood”) was shortened to りょ, and then — why waste a character? — to just り. A friend texts you the plan, you reply り, done. It's the thumbs-up of Japanese chat.

The same economy produced おつ — clipped from お疲れおつかれ, the all-purpose “good work today” — and それな, the one-word “exactly, so true” for agreeing with a friend's complaint. Add 草くさ for laughter and you can hold up your end of a group chat with about four syllables a day.

Notice what this dialect values: speed and low ceremony between people who already trust each other. Keep that in mind — it's the exact opposite of what we'll meet at the other end of the generational spectrum.

草くさ — how laughter became grass

The evolution goes like this. Written Japanese marked laughter with 笑わらい in brackets — “(laughs)”, like a stage direction. Online, typists shortened it to the letter w (from warai), and stronger laughter stacked it: www, wwww.

Then someone looked at wwww and saw a lawn — rows of little blades sticking up. So laughter became 草くさ, “grass”: 草くさ means “lol”, and something truly hilarious 草生えるくさはえる (“grass is growing”). For maximum laughter there's even 大草原だいそうげん — “the great prairie”.

All three generations of the joke are still alive: w and www remain common, 草くさ is everywhere. You now understand a message that consists, in its entirety, of one botanical character.

The period that feels cold

Here's the subtlest item in the decoder, and a genuinely recent shift. In rapid chat, young texters mostly skip the sentence-final period (。) — messages end where they end. Which means that when a period does appear, it can read as deliberate: formal, distant, or quietly annoyed.

A curt わかりました。 from someone who usually writes りょ can land like a door clicking shut. The phenomenon has been widely discussed in Japanese media in recent years — sometimes under the half-joking name マルハラ, “period harassment” — with older texters baffled to learn their ordinary punctuation was being read as mood.

For you as a learner: keep writing full punctuation in anything formal — emails, messages to teachers, workplaces. This nuance belongs to fast casual chat between friends, and even there it's a tendency, not a law. Nobody reasonable is grading your periods.

Anatomy of the おじさん構文おじさんこうぶん — “ojisan style”

At the opposite pole from り sits a style so distinctive that Japanese internet culture gave it a name: おじさん構文おじさんこうぶん, “ojisan style” — sometimes translated “the ojisan construction” — ojisan being the friendly word for a middle-aged man. It's the texting voice of the enthusiastic uncle, and once you can spot it, you'll never unsee it.

A specimen: ヤッホー☀️ 久しぶりだネひさしぶりだね😊 おじさんは今日、おじさんはきょう、美味しいラーメンを食べたよおいしいらーめんをたべたよ🍜✨ 今度一緒に行こうネこんどいっしょにいこうね😉 ナンチャッテ😅

The field marks, in order: a chirpy opening; an emoji after nearly every clause; sentence endings switched to katakana (ネ instead of ね) for a playful look; referring to oneself in the third person as おじさん; an unprompted report of one's own day; an invitation; and the signature ナンチャッテ (“just kidding!”) that walks the invitation back. Length is a feature too — where a younger texter sends five words, ojisan style sends a paragraph.

Why the generations text so differently

The style isn't random — it's a fossil record. Today's ojisan generation learned to text on flip phones, where messages were emails: they had subject lines, they took effort to type, and decorating them with pictograms and glitter — a whole craft of it in the 2000s — was how you showed warmth. Long, ornamented, complete: that was good texting.

Their kids grew up inside chat apps, where conversation is a stream of tiny bubbles and warmth is shown by responding fast, not by decorating. Same language, two opposite ideas of what a caring message looks like. The emoji cloud reads as effort to one generation and as effort in the wrong place to the other.

Which is why the meme is ultimately affectionate: everyone recognizes their own dad in it. Young people trade parody ojisan texts precisely because the style radiates a clumsy, sincere friendliness — and plenty of them deploy a ナンチャッテ ironically themselves.

What you can actually use

Now the practical sorting. り, おつ, それな, 草くさ and w are safe with friends in casual chats — and only there. In work messages, emails, or anything with a stranger, write standard Japanese with standard punctuation; texting slang in a formal channel reads far worse than no slang at all.

Ojisan style is different: it's for reading, not for typing. Sending it sincerely would make you a walking parody; even sending it as a joke requires timing that's risky in a second language. File it with role language from fiction — a style you recognize with delight and leave on the shelf. And remember that texting slang ages fastest of all slang: today's 草くさ will eventually be someone's dated habit too.

The decoder, in one screenshot:

Train your eye on the real thing

Texting slang is a reading skill, and reading skills grow by exposure: group chats, comment sections, and casual social feeds will hand you り and 草くさ within minutes. Every specimen you decode on sight is one less moment of staring at a one-character message in confusion.

Start now, in a safe environment: our slang quiz covers the spoken essentials — やばい, めっちゃ and friends — and includes the texting habits from this guide. See how much of the dialect you already read.