> I really thought you meant Caucasian. Did you just mean light-skinned?
It would have been better if I said "light-skinned", yes. While East Asians are not "white" in the "racial" sense (ew), their skin is light much like Europeans', and thus when the Japanese created the emoji, they made them have light skin.
A Japanese person draws a simple human face, an American draws a simple human face, both will draw "white" skin.