The First Popular Emoji Set Ships on Japanese Phones

Setting the scene

Japanese mobile culture in the 1990s packed emotional nuance into short pager messages; NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service needed compact pictographs to replace words on tiny screens where bandwidth and character limits constrained expression.

What happened

NTT DoCoMo's emoji set debuted in 1999, designed by Shigetaka Kurita with 176 twelve-pixel characters including weather, hearts, and a poop icon that signaled humor rather than offense in Japanese context.

Why it still matters

Unicode later standardized emoji globally from 2010 onward, exploding into skin-tone modifiers and corporate keyboards; Kurita's originals entered MoMA's collection, proving digital glyphs could carry the cultural weight of hieroglyphs or emoticons.

Background

Unicode later standardized emoji globally.