Emojis: this Japanese man created them in 1998 – Apple and Google made them a global phenomenon
What began as primitive digital drawings is growing into an elaborate tool for communication
The tiny smiley faces, hearts, knife-and-fork or clenched fist have become a global language for mobile phone messages. They are displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They star in a new Hollywood film.
The emoji is heir to a tradition of pictographic writing stretching back millennia to Egyptian hieroglyphics and the ideograms used to write Chinese and Japanese.
Despite their ubiquity, they started in 1998 with one man: a 25-year-old employee of mobile phone carrier NTT DoCoMo who created the first set of 176 in one month as he rushed to meet a deadline.
“I happened to arrive at the idea. If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have,” said Shigetaka Kurita, who now is a board member at Dwango Co., a Tokyo technology company.
Kurita’s challenge: NTT DoCoMo’s “i-mode” mobile internet service limited messages to 250 characters, which cried out for some kind of shorthand.
A message that said, “What are you doing now?” could be menacing or nosy, but adding a smiley face softened the tone.