The Story of Emoji: From Japan to the World

Today, people all over the world send smiling faces, hearts and thumbs-up signs in their messages. These little pictures are called emoji, and the word itself comes from Japanese. It combines e, meaning picture, and moji, meaning character, so it has no connection with the English word emotion.

Small picture symbols started to appear on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s. One of the best-known early sets was designed in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita for NTT Docomo's i-mode service. He created 176 small images, and each one was drawn on a tiny grid of twelve by twelve pixels. For ideas, he looked at weather symbols, street signs and the visual language of manga.

At first, however, each phone company in Japan had its own emoji. As a result, a picture sent from one company's phone did not always appear correctly on another. Later, companies including Google and Apple asked for emoji to be added to Unicode, the international standard for text on computers. In 2010, hundreds of emoji were added to the standard, so they could be shared more easily between different devices.

Since then, emoji have spread far beyond Japan. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art in New York added Kurita's original set to its collection. This showed that these simple images were now seen as an important part of design history.

Many Japanese readers may remember sending emoji from older mobile phones, long before smartphones arrived. Next time you add a smiling face to a message, remember that you are using an idea that grew up in Japan.