Correcting the Record on the First Emoji Set

Not only was the 1997 SoftBank emoji set released earlier than the first known date of the Docomo emoji set (in “1998 or 1999”), one of the most iconic emoji characters now encoded as 💩 U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO in the Unicode Standard, originated in this release. The Unicode Consortium has long listed one version of Japan’s emoji sets from each of the three major Japanese carriers – but being a standards body and not an emoji archive, it wasn’t clear how many versions of each emoji set existed in Japan over these years. At the time, Porto Rebaix wrote (archived URL) about the specific emoji images that can be traced back to this emoji set:

In fact, Shigetaka Kurita himself tweeted in January 2019 that “The first emoji use in mobile devices in Japan was a pager, but in mobile phones DoCoMo wasn’t the first, I think it was J-PHONE DP-211SW”:

SoftBank, known as J-Phone at the time, released the SkyWalker DP-211SW with 90 distinct emoji characters in November 1997.

Source: blog.emojipedia.org