Emojion📟❤️📱😂
How Emoji Were Born in Japan: From a Pager Heart to a Global Language
Emoji are one of the few things the whole connected world types every day — and they were born in Japan. The name says so: 絵文字 (emoji) is simply 「絵」 (picture) + 「文字」 (character). Its resemblance to the English “emotion” is a coincidence.
The popular story is that emoji began in 1999 with a set of 176 icons for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode. That set mattered enormously — but it was not actually the first. The real path runs from a pager heart in 1995, through the first mobile-phone set in 1997, to i-mode, to Unicode, to a crying-with-laughter face being named a Word of the Year. Here is the sourced version.
1995: a heart you could send
The earliest picture-symbol most people actually sent was not on a phone but on a pager. In March 1995, NTT DoCoMo’s Pocket Bell let users send a small pixel heart ❤ (and a telephone ☎) by dialling a code. Pagers were a teenage craze — by 1996 close to half of Japan’s female high-school students carried one — and the heart became a way to add warmth to a screen of digits. The designer of the first phone emoji later named this pager heart as his direct inspiration.
1997: the first emoji on a phone (not the one you’ve heard of)
This is where the popular story is wrong. The first emoji set built into a mobile phone shipped on 1 November 1997, on SoftBank’s (then J-Phone) SkyWalker DP-211SW: 90 monochrome 12×12 characters — including the pile of poo 💩 that is still with us. That was two years before i-mode. Even Shigetaka Kurita, credited with “the first emoji,” has said plainly that on mobile phones J-Phone came first, not DoCoMo.
1999: i-mode and the 176 that changed everything
In February 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode, an early mobile internet service, and with it a set of 176 emoji designed by Shigetaka Kurita. Working in a tiny 12×12 grid and drawing on manga, weather symbols and the Zapf Dingbats typeface, he built a compact vocabulary of feelings, weather and objects. It was not the first set, but it was the influential one — an instant hit, copied by rivals within months, and a design later collected by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Chaos, then a standard
Each carrier drew its own emoji with its own hidden codes, so a heart sent on one network could arrive as gibberish — or as something else entirely — on another. That incompatibility is exactly why emoji needed to be standardised. In 2010, Unicode 6.0 became the first version to encode emoji as real, shareable characters. When Apple and Google adopted it that same year, emoji left Japan and went global.
From phone screens to the museum
Once everyone had the same emoji, they became a shared language. In 2015 Oxford Dictionaries named 😂 Face with Tears of Joy its Word of the Year — the first time a pictograph won. In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art added Kurita’s original 176 emoji to its collection and showed them as “Inbox: The Original Emoji.” A set of 12×12 icons from a Japanese phone service had become both everyday language and museum art.
The story in one timeline
| Year | What happened | |
|---|---|---|
| 📟 | 1995 | A sendable heart ❤ appears on DoCoMo’s Pocket Bell pagers. |
| 💩 | 1997 | J-Phone ships the first mobile-phone emoji set (90 characters). |
| 📱 | 1999 | DoCoMo’s i-mode launches with Kurita’s 176 emoji. |
| 🌐 | 2010 | Unicode 6.0 encodes emoji; Apple and Google adopt it worldwide. |
| 😂 | 2015 | Oxford Dictionaries names 😂 its Word of the Year. |
| 🖼️ | 2016 | MoMA collects the original 176 emoji. |
FAQ
- Were emoji really invented in Japan?
- Yes. The word 絵文字 is Japanese (「絵」 “picture” + 「文字」 “character”), and the whole early history is Japanese: a sendable heart on DoCoMo pagers in 1995, the first mobile-phone set from J-Phone in 1997, and i-mode’s influential 176 in 1999.
- Wasn’t i-mode’s 1999 set the first emoji?
- It is the most famous and the most influential, but not the first. On mobile phones, J-Phone’s 1997 set came earlier, and pager symbols earlier still. Kurita, who designed the i-mode set, has said so himself.
- Does “emoji” come from “emotion” or “emoticon”?
- No — that is a coincidence. 絵文字 combines the Japanese 「絵」 (picture) and 「文字」 (character), and predates its English lookalikes. (This site’s own name, Emojion, is a deliberate play on that accident of sound: Emoji × Emotion.)
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