On the Origin of Emojis
A new discovery reveals a forgotten chapter in the history of our digital lifestyles
From the ukiyo-e woodblock prints that sparked the Japonisme fad of the late 19th century, to the anime and manga that attract so many fans in the 21st, illustrated art has long served as Japan’s face to the world. Emoji are another (literal?) example, integrating into online lifestyles so seamlessly that many users don’t even realize the little glyphs originated in Japan.
Last week, the game developer Matt Sephton announced the discovery of what may be the world’s earliest set of emoji, dating back to the late Eighties. (I say “may” for reasons I’ll get into in more detail at the end.) This might surprise, for emoji feel more a part of 21st century life. They debuted on Japanese feature phones at the turn of the Millennium. They initially seemed a goofy quirk of the local marketplace, but the smartphone gave them a global passport in the late Aughts. By 2015 emoji were so ubiquitous abroad that Barack Obama gave them a shout-out in a speech on the White House lawn. A year later, the Museum of Modern Art acquired copies of what was then believed the earliest set of emoji, from 1999, for their permanent collection.
Emoji have had quite a ride over the last quarter century, but Sephton’s discovery pushes their history back even earlier. He found the precursor of a modern emoji palette on a long-forgotten piece of consumer tech, a Sharp PA-8500 digital organizer from 1988. In other words, Sharp put a form of emoji in the hands of Japanese citizens a decade before emoji were even supposed to have been invented.
Here they are:
Emoji seem like insignificant trifles in the scheme of things, but it’s like Michelangelo once said: trifles make perfection, and it’s hard to imagine communicating online today without all those trifling little smileys, heart-marks, and anthropomorphic piles of poop. They’re hieroglyphics of the early digital era.
That’s what makes this discovery so interesting. It’s about more than emoji archaeology: it’s yet another example of the role Japanese visual culture has played in the world of tech. You can see it in how the first video game fads centered on Japanese characters like the Space Invaders (one of which has its own emoji) and Pac-Man (who resembles an emoji himself.) You can see it in how Steve Jobs used a Hashiguchi Goyo print to sell the Mac. And you can see it today, in AI companies’ ongoing obsession with things Japanese.
I published a history called The Secret Lives of Emoji in 2016. The visual precursors of emoji date back centuries. One of my favorites is the eshingyo, a rebus invented in the Edo era by a Buddhist temple to assist illiterate parishioners in chanting the Heart Sutra. But from a computing standpoint, the ancestors of emoji can be traced back to special characters included in the font sets of early dedicated word processors made by Wang Laboratories. These were later incorporated as-is by the designers of early personal computers. “When it came time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC” in 1980, Bill Gates told Fortune, “we put the funny Wang character set into the machine, you know, smiley faces and boxes and triangles and stuff.” These “funny” characters weren’t intended for texting, but rather as graphical elements for tables, charts, and later, computer games.
The most direct antecedents of emoji are emoticons. These constructions of punctuation were coined in 1982 to inject emotional shading into text-based conversations on academic bulletin-board systems. Some of these are still widely used today, such as the colon-and-parentheses sideways smiley face :)
So special characters and emoticons were invented in the West. Yet emoji took off in Japan first. The reason is simple: Japan was the first country to deploy a commercially viable mobile internet system. DoCoMo’s “i-mode,” launched in 1999, fast-tracked huge swaths of the young Japanese population online. (This is also, incidentally, when 2channel, the anonymous message board that presaged 4chan, launched.) As mobile texting took off in Japan, users ran into the same issues early BBS users had: it was tough to make emotional nuance understood with text alone.
Japanese women had already “hacked” pocket pagers into makeshift texting devices by using numerical codes in place of words. They seized on the special character palettes included in the earliest net-capable cell phones, peppering their texts with hearts, smileys, and other icons. In the process these early adopters pioneered a visual argot better suited to the rapidly coming era of 24-7 online communications.
“Emoji were really key to i-mode becoming a big hit,” Shigetaka Kurita, who oversaw their incorporation into the system, told me in a 2016 interview. “A great many customers purchased i-mode phones specifically because they wanted to send lots of emails or text messages to friends and wanted to use emoji because they were cute.”
Kurita, and rivals at other companies, mined Japan’s manga culture for visual shorthands, luring customers away from each other with the expressiveness of their exclusive emoji sets. Emoji became so crucial to the consumer-tech marketplace in Japan that when Apple launched its iPhone there in 2008, it failed due to a lack of emoji support. In the years to come, Apple and Google would collaborate with Unicode to standardize the specifications of emoji so that they could be exchanged easily regardless of the device or app being used.
Which brings us to the current discovery. When emoji culture started blowing up abroad in the early 2010s, the mass media searched for an originator, and they crowned Kurita’s set of 176 emoji for DoCoMo from 1999. But emoji scholars (yes, we exist) and even Kurita himself knew of the existence of a precursor, included with a Pioneer feature-phone two years earlier, in 1997. That phone failed to sell, making it something of a dead end in the emoji evolutionary tree, so it made a certain sense to pick DoCoMo’s as the starting point. DoCoMo had the biggest market share of the era, so their phones are the ones that taught the world to emoji, so to speak.
Now we have Sephton’s digital archaeology to thank for unearthing recognizable ancestors of what might be called emoji dating back to 1988. But why do I qualify this (really quite awesome!) discovery with a “might?” Because these glyphs, evocative as they are, modern though they seem, almost certainly weren’t used in the ways that emoji are today, or even widely known by that term.
Emoji are widely used to represent emotions, so even seemingly specific ones like 💩 are often deployed metaphorically. Most of the iconography on the Sharp device corresponds to very literal concepts: map markers, holidays, zodialogical signs, weather forecasts, and the like. And they didn’t transform the “digital dialogue” in the way later emoji would — that’s why their very existence was forgotten for decades. In fact, the word emoji hadn’t even entered the popular lexicon at this point, even in Japan. If you’d asked anyone outside of a graphic designer in 1988 what one was, they’d likely have reacted with a very literal 🤔
It would be another few years before Japanese schoolgirls began hijacking the “funny characters” from the font-sets of digital devices into the emoji we know. But these Sharp proto-emoji are an amazing find nonetheless, a missing link between the logical typographical symbols from old operating systems and the emotion-rich emoji we text today.
I always thought that Japan was late to adopt the iPhone because early models weren't much better than the feature phones already available, with basically the same features but a much sturdier build. But you've provided a more specific explanation; 2008 iPhones were lacking in emoji. It's like trying to sell someone a keyboard without a, hyphen, and t. The essential elements of communication just aren't there.