The History of Emoji: From Japanese Mobile Phones to a Global Standard
How tiny picture characters on 1990s Japanese phones became a worldwide standard, from Unicode and the iPhone keyboard to the Oxford Word of the Year.
Emoji are now used by people all over the world every day, but they started on mobile phones in 1990s Japan. Even the name is Japanese. It combines "e" (絵), meaning picture, and "moji" (文字), meaning character, and it has nothing to do with the English word emotion, which only looks similar.
This article walks through the key moments on the way from tiny Japanese picture characters to a worldwide standard. If you're preparing a school assignment or a presentation, it can also help you line up the years and the sequence of events.
Picture characters from Japanese carriers in the 1990s
In the late 1990s, sending short messages on mobile phones was spreading quickly in Japan. Screens were small and the number of characters was limited, so symbols that could carry the weather or a mood in one small picture became very popular.
1997: J-Phone's picture characters
The first to offer picture characters on mobile phones was J-Phone, the carrier that later led to SoftBank. In 1997 it released phones that could use picture characters such as hearts. At that point, though, only some models could use them, so they didn't spread widely.
1999: Shigetaka Kurita's 176 emoji
The best-known starting point for emoji is NTT DoCoMo's mobile internet service "i-mode" in 1999. A set of 176 picture characters, created with Shigetaka Kurita (栗田穣崇), who worked at DoCoMo at the time, as the central figure, went into that service.
These emoji were drawn in an extremely small grid, 12 pixels by 12. They included weather symbols such as the sun, clouds and umbrellas, plus hearts, telephones, food and facial expressions, the pictures that short messages most often need. In recognition of their historical value, those 176 emoji became part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2016.
Each carrier went its own way
As emoji grew popular, other carriers made their own. The problem was that DoCoMo, au (KDDI) and SoftBank each used a different emoji list and different internal numbers. The same heart had a different number at each carrier, so when you sent one to a user on another carrier, it often turned into a strange symbol or vanished altogether. That is why emoji needed a "standard."
Joining Unicode (2010)
In the late 2000s, Google and Apple, who had moved into the Japanese market, needed to be able to send and receive Japanese phone emoji properly in their own services too. So a proposal was made to put the Japanese carriers' emoji into Unicode, the worldwide standard for characters, and after several years of discussion, hundreds of emoji were formally included in Unicode 6.0 in 2010.
This was the decisive turning point. Emoji stopped being one company's pictures and became "characters" with unique numbers, like the letters of the alphabet. From then on, a device from any company that received the same number could show an emoji with the same meaning. The pictures themselves are still drawn separately by each company, which is why emoji look a little different from device to device even now.
On EmojiCanvas emoji pages, the ones with "2010" shown as the year added are the early emoji that entered Unicode in this period.
The Apple keyboard and worldwide spread
The biggest contributor to spreading emoji beyond Japan was the iPhone. In 2008 Apple put an emoji keyboard on the iPhone for the Japanese market, and at first it could only be used in Japan. But interest from users in other countries was so strong that they shared ways to get around the settings and switch the emoji keyboard on.
From iOS 5 in 2011, iPhones everywhere in the world could use the emoji keyboard by default. Together with Unicode standardization, other platforms such as Android began supporting emoji, and as smartphones spread, emoji quickly became an everyday language around the world.
😂 Word of the Year (2015)
2015 was the year that showed how big emoji had become. Oxford Dictionaries chose not a word but the emoji 😂 (face with tears of joy) as its "Word of the Year." The reason given was that it was the most used emoji in the world that year.
Since 2014, there has also been a custom of celebrating July 17 as "World Emoji Day." The date is said to come from the July 17 shown on Apple's 📅 (calendar) emoji.
Variations that reflect diversity
As emoji spread across the world, people pointed out that "all the people emoji have the same skin tone, and the gender of job emoji leans to one side." Unicode responded by introducing a way of adding variations to emoji.
- 2015: A method was introduced that expresses five skin tones by attaching a skin tone modifier after people and hand emoji. It made it possible to give the same thumb a different skin tone, like 👍🏽.
- Afterward: As the "combined emoji" method, which links several emoji with an invisible connecting character, came into wide use, job emoji with a choice of gender, people emoji with no gender specified, and emoji for many kinds of families were added one after another.
Today anyone can propose a new emoji to the Unicode Consortium, and new emoji are added every year after review. Emoji that started with 176 in 1999 now number in the thousands once you count the skin tone variations.
Traces of Japanese emoji that remain today
Emoji have become a world standard, but look closely at the keyboard and you'll find traces of the Japanese mobile phone days all over. Because the early emoji were carried over straight from the Japanese carriers' lists, there are emoji in the default set today whose meaning is hard to guess unless you are Japanese.
- 🙇 Person bowing: An emoji for a deep Japanese-style apology and polite requests. It is also often used as an apology in Korea.
- 💮 White flower: It comes from the flower-shaped stamp that Japanese teachers put on well-done homework and test papers, like a "great job" stamp.
- 🈵 "Full" ideograph: The kanji 満 (full), a sign used in Japan to show that a parking lot or shop is full.
- 🉐 "Gain" ideograph: A Japanese shop-style mark meaning a bargain or a good deal.
- 🔰 Symbol for beginner: The green and yellow badge that people in Japan who have just gotten a driver's license put on their cars.
- 🎌 Crossed flags: These depict the crossed national flag decorations Japan hangs out on national holidays.
- 🍙 Rice ball and 🗾 map of Japan: Emoji drawn from Japanese food and place names were included from the start too.
Looking at these emoji, you can really feel that emoji weren't designed as a "universal language" from the beginning. They are symbols that were born in Japanese everyday culture and spread to the world. That history is also why the same emoji can end up being read with different meanings in different countries.
- 🙇A polite apology from Japan
- 💮A "great job" stamp
- 😂2015 Word of the Year
Last checked 2026-10-23