Until now, Japanese phone carrier Docomo has most often been widely credited as the originator of what we know as emoji today. It turns out, that might not be the case, and today we are correcting the record.
SoftBank, the carrier that partnered with Apple to bring the iPhone to Japan in 2008, released a phone with support for 90 distinct emoji characters in 1997. For the first time, these are now available on Emojipedia.
The 90 emojis from SoftBank in 1997 predate the set of 176 emojis released by Docomo in 1999, which until now have most commonly been cited (including by Emojipedia) as being the first.
Above: Shigetaka Kurita's emoji set (shown here at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) from 1999 may not have been the first. Photo: John Wronn at
Not only was the 1997 SoftBank emoji set released earlier than the first known date of the Docomo emoji set (in "1998 or 1999"), one of the most iconic emoji characters now encoded as š© U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO in the Unicode Standard, originated in this release.
Unless or until we find evidence that Docomo had an emoji set available prior to this release, we hereby issue a correction that the original emoji set is from SoftBank in Japan in 1997, with designer/s unknown.
Above: Until recently, Docomo was considered to have the first emoji set in 1999, when it might have been SoftBank in 1997. Now shown on Emojipedia.
Emojipedia was founded in 2013 and originally listed only current-day Apple emoji designs. In recent years, we have been making efforts to ensure 'the missing years' of emoji releases from the late 1990s until 2013 - arguably some of the most important historically - are preserved in our archives.
š Delve into our emoji archive you never know the treasures you might find š¼ https://t.co/pmo9t32y8O pic.twitter.com/agy5058d5dā Emojipedia š (@Emojipedia) April 6, 2018
Last year we finished documenting emojis which originate in early versions of Windows, Android, and iPhone OS (as it was known when emoji support first came to iOS).
Apple's emoji set turned 10 in 2018 and this was an opportune time to look back at how much had changed, and yet how familiar many designs remained.
Above: An original iPhone with original emoji set next to a modern-day iPhone. Photos: Jeremy Burge.
In the process of updating the Emojipedia archive to include Japanese emoji sets, it quickly became clear that there were gaps.
The Unicode Consortium has long listed one version of Japan's emoji sets from each of the three major Japanese carriers - but being a standards body and not an emoji archive, it wasn't clear how many versions of each emoji set existed in Japan over these years.
After speaking with others in this space, it quickly became clear that there were a large number of revisions to Japanese emoji sets that we hadn't even begun to document.