emoji
Typing this Japanese word into your iPhone or Android device will introduce you to some very unusual characters.
The beloved anime magical girl is helping flowers bloom on social media.
It’s not fire, and it’s not food, but every Japanese person immediately understands the symbol that has the rest of the world scratching their heads.
Common sense might lead you to believe that “emoji” is simply a variation of “emoticon,” but Japanese common sense tells a whole different story.
You likely know that emoji originated in Japan, but do you know how they ended up basically everywhere in the world?
In Japan, you don’t “like” something on Facebook, you “ii ne” it. But what about the five other “reactions” that Facebook has just added?
Japanese netizens are both creeped out and confused by this new Thanksgiving/Christmas emoji from Skype.
When Japanese Twitter user @nasuiro posted this picture of a blob of hand cream last week, he probably had no idea that it would end up being retweeted over 41,000 times…
Oxford Dictionaries, the online arm of the publisher of the Oxford Dictionary of English, has announced that its 2015 Word of the Year is an emoji. No, not the word “emoji,” but a single, specific emoji.
Recently, with elements of the Japanese language and its culture starting to be adopted by people in countries the world over, we hear the word “emoji” being used incredibly often overseas. In fact, both the word “emoji” and the digital images themselves have become pretty much universal.
And now, those emoji that I knew from my cell phone screen here in Japan have even been turned into fashion icons!
In Part 1 of this article, we learned some fun facts about three iconic foods so beloved by the Japanese that they, yup, became icons—how an old lady and a samurai gave birth to the first rice cracker; what it means to be called a pudding-head in Japan; and how a classic 1960s manga cemented the way oden would be illustrated for decades to come.
So get ready for Part 2, in which I’ll attempt to sift through millennia of history and get you further acquainted with three more emoticons!
First we’ll look at the mythical tengu, a complex, multifaceted creature that in modern times pops up in things like Digimon and the Mega Man series. Then we’ll check out a New Year’s decoration that may have originated from taketaba, a shield made from bundled bamboo that became necessary once firearms were introduced. To close, we’ll explore the customs and lore surrounding the Tanabata festival, including the romantic legend of Orihime and Hikoboshi, who are both star-crossed lovers and actual stars in the sky.
LINE is a free instant-messaging and voice-call application that’s almost a necessity in Asia; for many, it’s cheaper than texting through their mobile plan, and the app’s astounding collection of oversized emoticons called stickers and sticons (short for sticker emoticons) makes chatting with your friends that much more fun and cute! However, Japanese users recently noticed a puzzling sticon that had found its way into the pool. The image, which we’ll be looking at later, is based on a worldwide fad that didn’t seem to catch on in Japan, so it’s no wonder that people were confused.
This prompted me to wonder, “Which emoji are gathering dust because some people don’t quite know what they are or what they mean?” Since emoji (literally meaning “pictographs”) originated in Japan and later became incorporated into Unicode, it makes sense that many are emblematic of that country’s culture. After asking a few friends, choices were narrowed down to the above six emoticons, available on most smartphones. In Part 1 we’ll be examining the three food-based emoticons, so if you’re not familiar with that geometry lesson on a stick or the origins of that brown circle, read on after the jump!
Sometimes words just aren’t enough to convey what you have to say.
People tend to use emoji in both normal and unorthodox ways, and the emoji you use actually says a lot about you.
Enter Emojinalysis, a Tumblr blog that tells you what’s wrong with your life based on your recently used emoji.
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