Nov 6, 2025
You've never heard of him. But you use his invention 100 times a day.
1999.
Tokyo. A 25-year-old interface designer at NTT DoCoMo sat down with an impossible constraint: create 176 images that convey human emotion using exactly 144 pixels each. No more, no less.
He had five weeks.
The images couldn't exceed 18 bytes of data. The mobile internet platform launching—called i-mode—limited messages to 250 characters. Japanese formal communication required nuance that text alone couldn't provide. And teenagers had already proven they'd abandon entire telecom companies if you took away their ability to send a single heart symbol.
Shigetaka Kurita spent his first 10 days observing people in public. Watching faces. Studying expressions. Noting what mattered in Japanese communication that 250 characters couldn't capture.
Then he created something that would fundamentally change how 5 billion people express themselves digitally.
This is the story of emoji—not the yellow faces you know today, but the original 176 blocky, pixelated images that planted the seeds for a visual language now more universal than English. And how a constraint so severe it made designers "faint at the idea" became the foundation for one of the most transformative communication tools in human history.
Chapter 1: The Pocket Bell Heart
Japan, Mid-1990s
Before Shigetaka Kurita created emoji, there was a heart.
If you were a Japanese teenager in 1995, you needed a NTT DoCoMo Pocket Bell pager. The device could send short messages in Katakana syllabary. But more importantly, it could send two symbols: a phone icon (meaning "call me") and a heart ❤️.
Teenagers loved that heart.
The Pocket Bell sold out at peak popularity. Little hearts flew everywhere across Japan's mobile networks. Before the pager, teenagers used coded numbers—"724106" for "What are you doing?" and "14106" for "I love you." But now they could express emotion with a single symbol.
Imagine: Your pager vibrates. You reach down. On the tiny screen: a heart from someone you like.
Your own heart beats faster.
Then NTT DoCoMo made a mistake. They released an upgraded Pocket Bell aimed at business users. To free up memory and appear more professional, they removed the heart symbol.
Japanese teens abandoned DoCoMo in droves, switching to competitor Tokyo Telemessage who kept the heart.
The message was clear: symbols carried emotional weight that text couldn't replicate. People would switch carriers to keep that capability.
Shigetaka Kurita was watching.
Chapter 2: The San Francisco Trip
1998
Kurita was about 26 years old when DoCoMo sent him as part of a team to San Francisco to study AT&T's Pocket Net project.
The goal: put internet services—weather, news—into 1990s-era mobile phones with screens smaller than a Post-it note.
DoCoMo was building their own version called i-mode. They wanted to exchange ideas.
What Kurita saw in San Francisco was instructive—but not in the way AT&T intended.
Pocket Net displayed weather as text: "cloudy," "sunny" spelled out. News came as plain characters. The screens were tiny. The data was slow. Everything felt harder than it needed to be.
"At the time, the specs on the devices were really poor, so they weren't able to display images," Kurita explained. "Pocket Net had weather news, but things like 'cloudy' and 'sunny' were just spelled out in text. The lack of visual cues made the service more difficult to use than it ought to be."
Kurita recognized AT&T's mobile experience would benefit enormously from visual symbols.
But he was already thinking bigger. The Pocket Bell heart had proven emotional symbols mattered. What if i-mode had not just weather icons, but symbols for feelings, places, actions—a whole visual vocabulary?
Back in Tokyo, the i-mode development team faced a critical decision: how do you make mobile internet work when screens are tiny, data is scarce, and Japanese communication requires subtlety?
The solution: give users 176 ways to say more with less.
Chapter 3: The 12x12 Pixel Prison
Tokyo, 1999
When i-mode launched in February 1999, it would limit messages to 250 characters.
That constraint created a problem. In Japanese business and social communication, formality matters. Tone matters. Context matters. The same phrase can be encouraging or insulting depending on subtle cues.
"What are you doing now?" could be friendly curiosity or threatening surveillance, depending on tone.
Digital text eliminated all those cues.
Kurita proposed a solution: pictograms that users could insert into messages to add emotional context and convey information efficiently.
The technical constraint was brutal: 12 pixels by 12 pixels. 144 total dots per image. 18 bytes of data each.
The complete set of 176 emoji would consume just over 3 kilobytes.
"I didn't like it," Kurita admitted, "because the number of spaces in the grid was not an odd number, and not being able to find a center made developing the emoji extremely laborious."
Without a center pixel, creating symmetrical faces and balanced designs became a puzzle every single time.
Jesse Reed, co-founder of Standards Manual (who later published a book on the original emoji), put it in perspective: "If you were given the challenge of translating 176 ideas, including people, places, emotions and concepts into 12-bit symbols, all within 5 weeks time, most designers would faint at the idea."
Five weeks. 176 unique images. 144 pixels each. No center point. No room for error.
Chapter 4: Ten Days of Observation
The Design Process
Kurita spent his first 10 days in public. Watching people.
Specifically, he paid attention to how people expressed themselves. Facial expressions. Body language. What mattered in human interaction that text couldn't capture.
He also observed the city. Signs. Symbols. Weather. What everyday things might need representation in this new visual language?
"I spent 10 days watching people. I wondered how many of those things could be expressed with pictures," Kurita recalled.
He quickly developed his first five or six emoji: smiley face for happy, frowning face for sad.
But he needed more than emotions. He needed a complete communication system.
Kurita drew inspiration from multiple sources:
Manga manpu (漫符): In Japanese manga, simple symbolic representations convey complex ideas. A water drop on a face = nervousness or confusion. Sweat marks = effort or anxiety. A light bulb over someone's head = idea.
These manpu were already part of Japanese visual literacy. Every manga reader understood them instantly.
"When I was a child, I loved the soccer manga Captain Tsubasa," Kurita explained. "Manpu are symbols used to describe people's emotion in manga, like sweat coming from someone's face."
Weather pictograms: Simple, universal, immediately understood.
Street signs: The "No Smoking" cigarette icon could be repurposed. Why reinvent symbols that already worked?
Chinese characters (kanji): The structure of logographic writing—where single characters represent complete ideas—informed how emoji could function as semantic units.
Kurita was constantly in communication with designers, testing what would and wouldn't work in the pixel grid.
Each emoji needed to be instantly recognizable at tiny size. Each needed to convey meaning without explanation. Each needed to work within the 12x12 constraint.
Chapter 5: The 176
The Original Set, 1999
The emoji Kurita created weren't random. They were strategic.
Eight categories emerged:
Weather (sun, cloud, rain, snow, umbrella)
Symbols (heart, music note, mail, phone)
Places (building, house, station, hospital)
Sports (soccer, baseball, golf, tennis)
Travel (car, airplane, ship, train)
Objects (clock, watch, hourglass, key)
Zodiac (all 12 signs)
Emotions (handful of facial expressions)
Notice what's missing: Most emoji were NOT faces. The yellow smiley faces ubiquitous today didn't come from Kurita's set. Those evolved from other emoticon systems.
Kurita's innovation was creating a functional communication system, not just emotional punctuation.
i-mode users could now send:
"Meeting ⌚ 3pm 🏢 downtown 🚇 station ☔ if rain ☎️ me ❤️"
Thirteen characters (including emoji) conveying what would have required 60+ characters in text.
Critical for a 250-character limit.
One notable absence: the poop emoji. "I would have liked to have created it," Kurita said, "but at the time, NTT DoCoMo said 'no good,' and I wasn't able to create it."
The famous red heart from the Pocket Bell pager remained, now part of a much larger vocabulary.
Chapter 6: Instant Success, Local Lock-In
1999-2010
In Japan, emoji were an instant hit.
Released in February 1999 alongside i-mode, the picture characters became a phenomenon within months. Kids across Japan used them constantly. Other Japanese telecoms—KDDI, J-Phone—quickly copied the concept, creating their own emoji sets.
But there was a problem: incompatibility.
Each carrier designed different symbols. Send a heart from DoCoMo to a KDDI user? It might appear as garbled text or a completely different symbol. Send " 💕" and receive "💔"? Not romantic at all.
By 2008, emoji were essential to communication in Japan. Companies trying to enter the Japanese market couldn't ignore them. But the competing standards created chaos.
Google tried including them in Gmail. Apple wanted them for the iPhone. But how do you make incompatible systems work together?
Meanwhile, emoji remained almost completely unknown outside Japan.
"In Japan, they were a big hit right away," Kurita recalled, "but the use of emoji overseas really took off starting from 2012, and I was surprised by that gap of time."
Nearly a decade passed between Japanese success and global adoption.
Chapter 7: The Unicode Revolution
2010
The breakthrough came when Unicode—the universal standard governing how computers encode text—decided to standardize emoji.
In 2010, emoji were incorporated into Unicode. For the first time, the same emoji sent from an iPhone would display correctly on Android, Windows, Gmail, anywhere.
Standardization unleashed global adoption.
2007: Apple released the iPhone with emoji support (to succeed in the Japanese market)
2010: Unicode standardization
2011: Apple added emoji to iOS for all users globally
2012+: Explosive international growth
Suddenly, billions of people who'd never heard of NTT DoCoMo or i-mode were using emoji daily.
The yellow faces everyone knows today? Those evolved from other emoticon traditions. But the weather symbols, the hearts, the objects, the places—many trace directly back to Kurita's 176.
Today, there are 2,789 emoji in the official Unicode list.
Billions are sent every day.
Chapter 8: The Museum Calls
New York, 2016
In 2016, something unprecedented happened: the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired Kurita's original 176 emoji for its permanent collection.
The exhibition was called "Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita."
These blocky, pixelated 12x12 grids now sat in the same institution as Picasso and Van Gogh.
MoMA called them "humble masterpieces of design [that] planted the seeds for the explosive growth of a new visual language."
When Kurita learned his work was entering MoMA, he was overcome with emotion.
"There they were, something I'd been involved with, although I'm neither an artist nor a designer," he said. "The museum saw value in the design that had the power to change people's lifestyles."
The designs are also held in the M+ museum in Hong Kong and were included in the 2018 exhibition "Being Modern: MoMA in Paris" at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
In 2023, Shigetaka Kurita received a Lifetime Achievement Webby Award at age 51.
"I was astonished because I never expected to receive such an award," he said.
Chapter 9: The Philosophical Kurita
On What Emoji Became
Kurita has complex feelings about modern emoji.
"Contemporary emoji aren't really emoji," he said. "Instead, the majority of them are simply pictures, I think. Because it makes inputting them difficult, there might also now be too many. Doesn't there seem to be an increase in the kind of emoji that someone might use only once?"
Today's emoji are created with vector graphics—they can scale to unlimited resolution. They're detailed, colorful, elaborate.
Kurita's were 12x12 pixels, blocky, constrained. Every pixel placement mattered.
"Kurita had to be increasingly decisive with every pixel that was placed," Jesse Reed noted, "and further to that, his team was making all the calls—there weren't focus groups or testing to dictate what they produced."
But Kurita maintains a positive view: "Emoji are used to enhance digital communication, which is centered on the mobile phone. From a design perspective, digital messaging was just getting started, and so I was thinking about what was needed."
His favorite emoji? The heart ❤️—the symbol that started everything with the Pocket Bell pager.
"The heart is my number-one favorite emoji, because among the various emoji, its meaning is very positive," Kurita explained. "You can add it to any negative word and turn it into something positive. The heart is the strongest emoji. Even if you wrote an insult like 'stupid' or you dislike something, you can soften it by using a heart and it's okay."
He also loves the sparkle ✨: "There is no particular meaning in the emoji itself, but it will decorate your remarks gorgeously."
Chapter 10: Lost in Translation
Cultural Meaning Across Borders
Many of Kurita's original emoji carried specific Japanese cultural meaning that got lost in global adoption.
Paul Galloway, a design curator, points out examples:
The red-faced devil mask 👺: In Japan, this is a Kabuki mask representing a specific character known for arrogance and brashness. Western users think it's just a malicious devil.
The hot springs icon ♨️: Deeply meaningful in Japanese culture (onsen bathing tradition), but most Western users have no context.
Cherry blossoms 🌸: Profound cultural symbolism in Japan (hanami tradition, ephemeral beauty, the passage of time), reduced to "pretty flower" elsewhere.
"I find it fascinating how language can begin in one place—or in this case, forms with a specific use—and then once it gets out there into the world, it's no longer in the hands of the creator," Galloway observed.
Emoji escaped their Japanese context and became something else—a global visual language where meaning shifts based on who's using them and where.
Chapter 11: The Compensation Question
What Kurita Received
Shigetaka Kurita receives zero royalties from emoji.
He holds no patents on the original designs. He doesn't earn money when Apple, Google, Samsung, or anyone else uses emoji systems descended from his work.
He created them as an employee of NTT DoCoMo as part of the i-mode development project.
In Japan, outside technology circles, he's relatively unknown.
"I happened to arrive at the idea," Kurita said modestly. "If I hadn't done it, someone else would have."
Maybe. But that someone else didn't have five weeks with a 12x12 pixel grid in 1999.
Kurita now works for Dwango Co. Ltd., a Japanese game company owned by Kadokawa Dwango Corporation, focusing on live video streaming services like Niconico.
He also teaches and lectures occasionally about design and the future of digital communication.
When asked if there's a Godzilla emoji, Kurita laughed and admitted there isn't—"but if there were a worldwide outcry, then perhaps there would be one developed in the future."
Chapter 12: The Cultural Builder Pattern
What Captain Startup Observes
Shigetaka Kurita's story exemplifies the Cultural Builder pattern: founders whose heritage becomes competitive advantage rather than obstacle.
Japanese Communication Culture as Foundation:
Japan's formal communication requires subtlety. "What are you doing now?" needs tone to clarify intent. Digital text eliminated that nuance. Kurita understood this problem viscerally because he lived within Japanese communication norms.
A Western designer might have created purely emotional symbols. Kurita created a functional system including weather, places, and objects because Japanese mobile internet users needed efficiency within the 250-character i-mode limit.
Manga Literacy as Design Language:
Growing up reading manga meant Kurita understood manpu—visual shorthand for emotion that every Japanese reader recognized. Water drops, sweat marks, anger symbols weren't just pictures; they were semantic units carrying specific meaning.
This cultural knowledge informed how emoji could work: not as illustrations but as semantic communication tools.
The Constraint as Teacher:
12x12 pixels wasn't just limitation—it was forcing function. Every pixel mattered. No room for decoration. Only essential information.
That constraint created designs so fundamental they remained recognizable even as emoji evolved into high-resolution color images.
The Observation Method:
Kurita spent 10 days watching people before designing anything. This patient observation—rather than rushing to solutions—allowed him to identify what actually mattered in human expression.
The Galapagos Mindset:
Japan's mobile industry was often called "Galapagos"—isolated, evolving separately from global standards. This was usually considered a weakness.
But Kurita embraced it: "I think Galapagos is OK. It's cool. After all, how can Japan hope to win as a global standard? And so we go ahead with our Galapagos ways in Japan, and people abroad will see it as wonderfully Japanese."
He built for local needs without worrying about global adoption. Ironically, that local focus created something globally transformative.
Chapter 13: The Unintended Consequences
What Emoji Changed
Emoji didn't just add punctuation to digital communication. They fundamentally altered how humans express themselves in text.
Scientific Impact:
Research shows we process emoji as non-verbal information. When we look at an emoji, the same brain areas activate as when we look at human faces. We mirror the emotion. Our facial expressions shift to match what we see.
This isn't trivial. This means emoji restore some of the emotional nuance that text communication stripped away.
Language Evolution:
Emoji function as a new writing system—not replacing language but augmenting it. They're closer to Chinese logographs or Egyptian hieroglyphs than to punctuation marks.
A single emoji can replace entire sentences. They add layers of meaning text alone can't convey. They transcend language barriers in ways words cannot.
Cultural Democratization:
Before Unicode standardization, emoji were Japanese technology. After 2010, they became genuinely global.
Emoji are now among Japan's most successful cultural exports—more universally adopted than anime, sushi, or karaoke.
Communication Accessibility:
For people with language barriers, learning disabilities, or communication challenges, emoji provide alternative expression methods. They make digital communication more inclusive.
Epilogue: From 144 Pixels to Universal Language
There's something profound about Shigetaka Kurita's story that transcends the technical achievement.
In 1999, a 25-year-old designer faced an impossible constraint: 176 ideas, 144 pixels each, five weeks.
He could have created purely decorative icons. He could have focused only on emotions. He could have designed for aesthetic beauty within the pixel limitation.
Instead, he observed. He drew from manga, street signs, weather symbols, kanji. He thought about what Japanese mobile users needed within a 250-character limit. He created functionality first, beauty second.
Those decisions—made pragmatically, locally, within severe technical constraints—accidentally created a communication revolution.
Today, over 5 billion people use emoji. They appear in business emails, court documents, literature, art. The Oxford Dictionary's 2015 Word of the Year was 😂 (Face with Tears of Joy).
Emoji have been used to translate the Bible, create portraits, make art, write poetry. They've become a genuine writing system—one that transcends alphabets and languages.
And it started with 144 pixels, a teenage heart symbol on a pager, and a designer who understood that sometimes the biggest innovations come from solving small problems really, really well.
Shigetaka Kurita never became wealthy from emoji. He's not a household name. He receives no royalties.
But every time someone sends ❤️ or 😊 or 🎉, they're using a communication system he pioneered. Every time emoji help someone express emotion that words fail to capture, Kurita's work lives on.
"Writing by text electronically is a deeply inhuman way to communicate," design curator Paul Galloway observed. "We are built as animals to look at each other, to smell each other, to respond to non-verbal cues. Japan is a very formal society—in writing, there are all these salutations and formal ways of addressing someone, which 10 years ago especially, you couldn't do on a tiny phone screen. What DoCoMo's emoji set established was a new kind of nuance in written communication, a set of signs to help us to understand one another on a distinctly emotional level even while hundreds of miles apart."
That was the gift: restoring humanity to digital communication.
From 144 pixels.
Captain Startup writes: "I've documented founders who built billion-dollar companies, revolutionized industries, and changed how millions live. But Shigetaka Kurita accomplished something more fundamental: he gave digital communication emotional nuance it desperately needed. The constraint of 12x12 pixels forced clarity so pure that his designs remain recognizable 25 years later, even as emoji evolved into high-resolution color. He built for Japanese mobile users in 1999 and accidentally created a visual language used by 5 billion people globally. That's not disruption. That's infrastructure for human connection."
Build with intent. ⚓
Read more Cultural Builder stories at chaiandcode.shop
A Chai & Code Production
Sources:
CNN Style: "Shigetaka Kurita: The man who invented emoji" (May 2018)
Wikipedia: "Shigetaka Kurita" (September 2025)
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA): Shigetaka Kurita Emoji collection documentation
AIGA Eye on Design: "The Story of the World's First Emoji" (May 2018)
Artnet News: "Emojis Officially Enter the Museum of Modern Art" (October 2016)
Designboom: "MoMA acquires the original set of emoji made in 1999" (October 2016)
Age of the Geek: "Emoji Pioneer Shigetaka Kurita Receives Lifetime Achievement Webby" (May 2023)
AsAmNews: "Father of emoji, Shigetaka Kurita, wins Lifetime Achievement Award" (May 2023)
Vermont Public: "Who invented emoji?" (May 2025)
Wonderopolis: "Who Invented Emojis?"
Emojipedia: "NTT Docomo" and "Correcting the Record on the First Emoji Set" (May 2025)
Britannica: "Shigetaka Kurita" biography
The Guardian: "Emoji inventor Shigetaka Kurita: 'I thought a visual language would be helpful in text'" (October 2016)
Inc.com: "Who Created Emojis? A 25-Year-Old Developer on a Deadline" (January 2025)
Medium: "Emoji: A Lovely History" by Colin M. Ford (January 2018)
Marvel Blog: "The Emoji Epidemic" (June 2016)
The World Today (blog): shigetaka kurita analysis
Linda Ikeji's Blog: "Meet Shigetaka Kurita: The Japanese software engineer that first created EMOJIS in 1999" (July 2017)
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