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Today is World Emoji Day!

National Emoji Day

Today is world Emoji Day! You encounter emojis on a regular basis in your tech-savvy lifestyle, but what is the history of emojis? They’re definitely a cultural phenomenon, as they originated from Japan, which you may have already guessed based on their name. According to the Verge, the man we can thank today for emojis is Shigetaka Kurita, the father of the emoji. As an employee of NTT DoCoMo (the biggest mobile-phone operator in Japan) back in the day, he was part of the intrepid i-mode team that sought to revolutionize Japan’s means of communication. He soon realized that digital communication—whether it’s email or, at the time, pagers(haha)—robbed human beings of the ability to communicate emotion. In Japan this is particularly important, as snail-mail letters have a tradition of being long-winded and emotional messages of goodwill. With digital, you ended up robbing people of this more personal aspect of communication, resulting in a relationship breakdown and miscommunication, that Kurita wanted to fix.

His solution was the emoji, which literally comes out to “picture” (e) and “character” (moji).

So, there you have it. Now we have emojis 😊

If you want to thank a single company for popularizing emoji globally, look no farther than Apple. The company that gave us Steve Jobs’ leadership style, super in-demand handhelds like the iPhone, and the simplicity of everything syncing together seamlessly, also ensured that emojis would catch on all over the world.