The Complete History of Emojis: From Japan's Pixels to Your Pocket 📱

Think about the last text you sent. Odds are, there was at least one emoji in it. Maybe a laughing face, a heart, or a fire. They feel completely natural now — just another part of how we talk. But have you ever stopped to wonder where they actually came from? The story of emojis is surprisingly deep, a little contested, and honestly, kind of wonderful.

Here at EmojiCircle, we dig into emoji culture so you don't have to. So let's take a proper walk through emoji history — all the way from a tiny 12-by-12 pixel grid in Japan to the AI-powered emoji generators of 2025.

It Didn't Start Where You Think

Most people assume emojis were invented in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, the Japanese designer who created 176 icons for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet service. Kurita himself is a fascinating figure — he drew inspiration from manga, weather symbols, Chinese characters, and street signs to craft a visual shorthand for the short, clipped messages that early mobile phones supported. His original set is now permanently housed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which tells you just how culturally significant those little pixels turned out to be.

But here's where the history gets more interesting. Research uncovered in 2019 by Emojipedia revealed that SoftBank — known then as J-Phone — had already released 90 distinct emoji characters in November 1997, beating Kurita's set by nearly two years. That 1997 set came pre-loaded on the SkyWalker DP-211SW handset, and it even included an early version of the now-iconic 💩 pile of poo emoji. Even Kurita himself acknowledged on Twitter in 2019 that J-Phone likely got there first on mobile phones.

And research published in 2024 pushed the timeline even further back, uncovering emoji-like sets on Sharp and NEC portable devices from the early 1990s — with the 1988 Sharp PA-8500 potentially containing the earliest known emoji keyboard we've found so far. History, as it turns out, is always being rewritten. Especially emoji history.

The Chaotic Middle Years: Japan's Three-Way Rivalry

For about a decade after 1997, emojis were entirely a Japanese phenomenon — and a messy one. Three major Japanese carriers (DoCoMo, SoftBank, and au by KDDI) each had their own proprietary emoji sets that were incompatible with each other. You couldn't send a DoCoMo emoji to a SoftBank user and have it show up correctly. It was the early internet equivalent of everyone speaking different dialects.

Meanwhile, in the West, platforms like ICQ, MSN Messenger, and AOL Instant Messenger were developing their own graphical emoticons — those little yellow smiley faces that feel almost retro now. It was a parallel evolution happening on the other side of the world, with neither side particularly aware of the other.

Unicode Steps In (Reluctantly)

Around 2007–2009, Google and Apple began pushing for emojis to be included in the Unicode Standard — the global text encoding system maintained by the non-profit Unicode Consortium. Unicode's core mission was preserving the world's written languages, not managing cartoon faces, and by many accounts they were not exactly thrilled about the task. But the commercial pressure was enormous.

Where We Are Now

Today, over 3,950 emoji are officially recognised by Unicode, and that number is set to grow with Emoji 18.0 potentially arriving in 2026. Roughly 10 billion emojis are sent every single day across the world. They've appeared in courtrooms as evidence, been analysed by linguists as a new form of language, and been debated by governments trying to understand what a 🍆 means in a legal context.

From 90 monochrome pixels on a phone that barely anyone bought, to a global visual language used by billions — that's quite a journey. And honestly? We're still only getting started.