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 NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode. Those emoji are famous — but they were not actually the first. The real path runs from a pager heart, through the first mobile-phone emoji in 1997, to i-mode, to Unicode, to a crying-with-laughter face being named a Word of the Year.

The pager: a heart you could send

❤️

The first picture-symbol many people sent was not on a phone but on a pager. On screens built around digits, you could add a small heart ❤. Shigetaka Kurita, who later designed the i-mode emoji, has said that seeing how this heart softened a message helped lead him to the idea of emoji.

1997: the first emoji on a phone (not the one you’ve heard of)

This is where the popular story goes wrong. The first mobile phone with emoji was Pioneer’s DP-211SW, released on 1 November 1997 alongside “Sky Walker,” a service launched by J-Phone (now SoftBank). That was more than a year before i-mode. Shigetaka Kurita, who designed the i-mode emoji, has said himself that on mobile phones J-Phone’s DP-211SW came first, not DoCoMo.

1999: the i-mode emoji

📱

In February 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode, an early mobile internet service. Its emoji were designed by Shigetaka Kurita. Working in a tiny 12×12 grid and drawing on the symbols used in manga and on pictograms like weather and street signs, he drew pictures for feelings, weather and things. They were not the first emoji, but they would later enter the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Chaos, then a standard

🌐

Each carrier drew its own emoji with its own codes, so an emoji sent from one company’s phone could arrive garbled — or as a different symbol — on another’s. In 2010, Unicode 6.0 encoded emoji as characters for the first time, giving every device the same numbers for them. The next year, Apple added a worldwide emoji keyboard in iOS 5, and emoji spread beyond Japan.

From phone screens to the museum

😂

In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named 😂 Face with Tears of Joy its Word of the Year — the first time an emoji was chosen. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art added 176 of the original i-mode 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

FAQ

Were emoji really invented in Japan?

Yes. The word 絵文字 is Japanese (「絵」 “picture” + 「文字」 “character”), and the early history is Japanese too: the heart you could send on pagers, the first mobile-phone emoji from J-Phone in 1997, and the i-mode emoji in 1999.

Weren’t i-mode’s 1999 emoji the first?

They are the most famous, but not the first. On mobile phones, J-Phone came first in 1997, and the pager heart came earlier still. Kurita, who designed the i-mode emoji, 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). (This site’s own name, Emojion, is a deliberate play on that accident of sound: Emoji × Emotion.)

More in this category

• ❤️red heart
• 📞telephone receiver
• 📱mobile phone
• 🌐globe with meridians
• 📲mobile phone with arrow
• 😂face with tears of joy
• 🖼️framed picture