The year was 1998. Cellphone users in Japan were increasingly using picture messages as a way to communicate. Mobile phone companies noticed this trend because pictures are much larger than text messages. A single picture message can be the size of hundreds if not thousands of text messages.
Mobile operators were already struggling to support the needs of 80 million users of a rapidly growing technology.
Engineers were told to fix this problem. The solution? Emoji.
The first emoji was created in 1998 or 1999 in Japan by Shigetaka Kurita, who was part of the team working on NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile Internet platform. Kurita took inspiration from weather forecasts that used symbols to show weather, Chinese characters and street signs, and from manga that used stock symbols to express emotions, such as lightbulbs signifying inspiration.
