Simple lines that evolved into a universal language
Emoji inventor remains little-known figure outside Japan’s tech circles
TOKYO — 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, 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.
“Digital messaging was just getting started, and so I was thinking about what was needed,” said Kurita.
Following i-mode’s launch in 1999, that nuance made emoji an immediate hit in Japan, where the demands of courtesy make for a complex art and a tiny mistake can prove costly. Emoji combines the Japanese for “picture”, or “e’’ (pronounced “eh”), and “letters”, or “moji” (moh-jee).
Kurita collected common images including signs, weather symbols, the zodiac and comic book-style pictures such as a light bulb or a ticking bomb.
With simple lines, he made five faces: happy, angry, sad, surprised and perplexed. The heart and a smiley face are still his favorites.
Kurita’s invention inspired The Emoji Movie, an animated film by Sony Pictures about emojis that live inside the world of a smartphone.
In 2010, the designs were adopted as a global standard by the Unicode Consortiums. That means any phone or operating system that follows the standard will use the same images, making them a universal language.
These days, Kurita works on a popular live video streaming service called Niconico. He believes such services will become more interactive, building online communities, possibly with artificial intelligence.
Kurita doesn’t feel all that involved with emoji today because they have evolved beyond his original set. He receives no royalties and is little-known in Japan outside technology circles.
He paid his own airfare to New York last year to see the Museum of Modern Art exhibit, which cited him by name. Kurita was overcome. “There they were, something I’d been involved with, although I’m neither an artist nor a designer,” he said. “The museum saw value in the design that had the power to change people’s lifestyles.”