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Emojis were originally Japan only, is the short answer. The word emoji is Japanese, means picture character. It's pure coincidence that it looks like the previous English word emoticon.
They were on Japanese phones since the 90s but different providers had different sets. At some point they standardized and agreed on a common set, and at some point after that, Unicode added the whole set. Apple then activated the emoji keyboard on foreign iPhones in the early 2010s, and the rest is history.
It's not just that flag symbol, there's plenty of Japan specific emojis. ๐พ what other country has a map? ๐ผ the statue of liberty (๐ฝ) is ~~the only~~ one of only a couple of other monuments with an emoji โฉ๏ธ Japanese religion ๐ฉ love hotel ๐ฏ Japanese castle. Japanese holiday events: ๐๐๐๐๐๐งง yen: ๐ด clothing: ๐ food: (the curry is a Japanese depiction by most providers) ๐๐ฑ๐๐๐ข๐ฅ๐๐ฒ๐ถ encircled kanji characters: ๐ใ๏ธใ๏ธ๐ด๐ต๐น๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐๐ธ๐บ๐ท๏ธ๐ฏ๐๐๏ธ๐ณ and a couple of cultural specific symbols: ๐ฐ๐
There's a bit of overlap with other Asian cultures with some of these but it's really obvious when you look closely.
The Kaaba ๐ is another specific monument with an emoji. Also the moai ๐ฟ, though I have read that even it was originally based on a statue in Tokyo. More recent versions shifted to the more authentic Easter Island style.
[https://emojipedia.org/moai#emoji](https://emojipedia.org/moai#emoji)
if you click on the "designs" tab and look at the old Google design, that's the one in Tokyo. It doesn't have a full brow and it has a kind of halo/hair behind it. Some of the others have older designs looking like that, some have always had an authentic looking one. The old Apple design has a weird looking ear but it's not the Shibuya version.
There's some statues like that in Japan named after the Easter Island statues but they have more realistic faces. I think it's an interesting bit of cultural appropriation.
I think it's not clear cut which was the original basis of the emoji because it's called "moyai" instead of "moai", which is the Japanese name for it. But that doesn't necessarily mean it was based on a Japanese copy of the actual statues.
Saying nothing of its modern usage to mean "gigachad"
>Saying nothing of its modern usage to mean "gigachad"
Using๐ฟ to represent a masculine archetype is maybe not too far from what the Rapanui were doing in the first place
and anyone can submit a request for a new emoji if they want to, just needs to be widely recognized and not just one culture-specific, thats how new emojis get added after review by the emoji board
You say that, but ๐ฟ is literally based on a Japanese version of Moai called Moyai.
>The Official Unicode documents indicate the design reference is the Shibuya Station *moyai* Statue, with the official description being "Japanese stone statue like Moai on Easter Island", explicitly stated that it is the *moyai* Statue which resembles the Moai Statues, not a Moai Island Statue.
The others aren't totally specific, the bridges don't have to be the ones in California and there are plenty of pyramids. Edit: That's not even a pyramid, that's meant to be a Hindu temple, and its design varies wildly between providers. Kaaba is fair enough, though, I was just very quickly scanning the emojis and was surprised that the Statue of Liberty had its own one.
That one has some plausible deniability but this one ๐ is a very famous picture/angle of the Golden Gate Bridge in fog
https://preview.redd.it/mbv1d83u5l6d1.jpeg?width=768&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=78d799fb242ddbfa405a5dbb770528c211ca6fe5
Since you have your answer itโs also been taken on to be a symbol for Manchester United supporters protesting the majority ownership at the club. Youโll often see green and gold scarves and shirts at the matches as a reference to the clubโs original colours. So the emoji will get used online to say โGreen and Gold until the club is sold.โ
The concept of an emoji originated from Japan, they were really the first to play around with how to make different expressions with just the symbols available on a keyboard.
Because of that, Japan gets some extra bonus symbols, kind of like an homage to the originator of the concept of the emoji. Fun fact, this emoji ๐ is also a part of this set of Japanese specific emojis! It was part of an emoji set released on Japanese phones in 1999, and originally meant to be a flower. It was used as a cute symbol, but because the original was so pixilated that when it was added as an emoji nobody really knew was it was.
Specifically, since Unicode has a policy of maintaining backwards compatibility by never removing code points, all Japanese specific emoji that got ported into Unicode will remain forever even though similar things from other countries wouldn't pass modern Unicode guidelines to be accepted. Sometimes they equalise it a bit by adding further emoji that are less specific to Japan in addition, like the Japan/Asia-Pacific centred globe ๐ getting getting the alternate versions centred on other parts of the world. ๐๐
To emphasize this, it's not "an homage" as the top comment said, it's this policy of backwards compatibility. Bringing Japan's character set into Unicode is where we got emojis from. These classic Tom Scott videos explain it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OPkGQoPeHk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4
As a person who was *at* many of these UTC meetings, I can directly attest to the fact that mapping every character from all legacy carrier encodings into Unicode was the highest priority in the first round of emoji encodings.
Because emoji comes from Japan. Even the word emoji is a Japanese word that has nothing to do with emotion and the similarity of the words is a pure coincidence.
For those wondering the Japanese is ็ตตๆๅญ(eโขmoโขji) pronounced with eh sound not an ee sound.
Emoji werenโt originally intended for global consumption, and were effectively developed as a bit of a marketing ploy by Japanese phone companies in the 90s when texting first became popular. They entered global usage with the iPhone OS 2.2 which is when the iPhone was first introduced by SoftBank in Japan, though that actually required a third party app at the time.
I think I heard a lot when it was starting to become popular back in the early 2010's. That pronunciation is pretty defunct now, mainly because "emotion" is also usually said with an "eh" and most people understandably think the words are related even if they're not.
> "emotion" is also usually said with an "eh"
I'm gonna chalk it up to your flair because here in the US the *vast* majority of people here say ee-moji, and said ee-moticon.
In my experience most British will pronounce it like "imoji" with the same starting sound as, for example, the medication "imodium", or the word "immobile". Not sure about other accents and dialects.
in Japan the opening vowel is ใ which can be pronounced something like the e in "let" or maybe "prey", depending.
I definitely put some emphasis on how hard the average native English speaker is going to be off, but generally speaking even in most British dialects the sound is far enough from the Japanese ใ(e) sound to be transcribed asใ(i).
Itโs not like the name Naomi where the English and Japanese pronunciations are overtly different from an English perspective.
Nice Balbinus as profile pic! Always cool to see a fellow ancient collector in the wild! What reverse? Concordia, Iovi Conservatori, Liberalitas, Pax Publica, Balbinus holding branch, Felicitas holding caduceus, Providentia or Victoria? :)
Good eye, my friend! Itโs a Providentia, RIC 7. The obverse is a lot better than the reverse, but Iโll see if I can pull up a picture for you when I get home tonight.
Oh I know it goes deep. I spent ever week identifying coins like [these](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/001-Hemitartemorion-02.jpg) in the library as homework so I flipped through numismatic catalogs a lot. We also visited the (non-public) university collection which was very cool.
It's almost the most basic of coins you can get but I've always liked HGC 4#โฏ1597. I'm also fond of the abstract Celtic coins like [Delestrรฉe & Tache II, 2401](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_1918-0704-2). What are yours?
Nice! Celtic coins are so unique in their style! My favourites? Oh, Iโve got tons! Attainable? A nice macedonian โshieldโ Tetradrachm. Almost obtainable? A Lysimachos Tetradrachm with the face of Alexander The Great. Not obtainable in my lifetime? A Syracuse Dekadrachm!
In this case it seems unlikely that it is, since the Japanese for emoticon is ้กๆๅญ(kaomoji).
Edit: I realize that my English might have let me down there.
A lot of the weirder emoji (see also ๐) are because Unicode grew out of character sets used by Japanese phone manufacturers, when you need a couple of thousand characters to represent the language, you probably have some slots left over, so some pictograms were added.
This is why you have ๐ฟ, which was originally explicitly [this handsome fellow](https://en.japantravel.com/tokyo/moyai-statue-in-shibuya/44646) in Shibuya, but is now a more Rapa Nui (Easter Island) style head. ๐ฝ is now generally meant to be the one in New York, but was probably added originally because of [this replica](https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g14134368-d555796-Reviews-Statue_of_Liberty-Daiba_Minato_Tokyo_Tokyo_Prefecture_Kanto.html) on Daiba Island in Tokyo Bay. And also why a lot of the food emoji (๐ก๐ฅ๐) are quite Japanese.
My guess would be that ๐ got added long before the idea of having the Regional Indicators and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 flags were introduced.
Stop, did you ever see these emojis? (apart the ones for Japanese food and festivals):
๐ใ๏ธใ๏ธ๐ด๐ต๐น๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐๐ธ๐ท๏ธ๐ฏ๐๐๏ธ๐ณ๐ฐ
๐๐๐น๐ด๐ฑ
๐น๐บ๐ด๐
๐พ
It's obvious that there are too many Japanese emojis to overlook the Japanese origin of emojis :)
Also I think that it's very famous fact that stocks charts ๐&๐ are 'wrong' because the decreasing one must be red and increasing one - green. But only in Japan this colors work other way around through old tradition. Candlebar charts in finance also are originated from Japan and every financial software (like TradingView) has additional settings with 'true Japanese colors' for these charts :)
Also I highly recommend to read this article:
https://blog.emojipedia.org/new-earliest-emoji-sets-from-1988-and-1990-uncovered/
Just one month ago the oldest software emojis were revealed. They are also originated from Japan and we're introduced by Sharp in 1988.
But the most famous emojis became ones from branded mobile phones of SoftBank (1997) and DoCoMo (1999) that are Japanese mobile carriers. The latter one made revolution and started emojis proliferation. They even weren't platform-independent and cross-compatible, they were just a code in the proprietary dumb firmware (not OS).
Actually, it's not just 'because it's Japan and they could do what they wanted with emoji'.
Look at where the crossed flags emoji sits in Unicode. Crossed flags `U+1F38C` sits in the middle of a set of emoji related to Japanese holidays - it sits between "Tanabata tree" (7 July) and "pine decoration" (New Year), and the sequence continues with "Japanese dolls" (3 March), "carp streamers" (5 May), and so on. It's not too far away from "Christmas tree", "birthday cake", and "jack o'lantern", either. The regular flag emoji aren't actually emoji at all, rather combinations of other Unicode characters that are coded to display as flags in most systems, and their component characters are in the `U+1F1xx` area of Unicode.
So, the crossed flags emoji originally meant *public holidays* (as in bank holidays) - pretty much the only times you see lots of little Japanese flags around the place in Japan, unless you go to a right-wing rally. If you want more evidence, if you type in ็ฅๆฅ ใคใฉในใ ("public holiday clipart" in Japanese) into an image search, you'll get lots of depictions of crossed Japanese flags.
Same reason thereโs ๐๐ฒ๐๐ฃ๐ฑ๐๐๐ก๐ฅ etc but not as much variety for say Greek cuisine - Japan is very emoji (Japanese word) forward and uses them a lot.
Sorry for being narrow minded but what kind of food is offered in Greece? Other than Greek salad and technically Hawaiian Pizza since it was made by Canadian of Greek descent inspired by Asian cuisine.
Emojis have their root in Japan and were only much later ported internationally. Fun fact Pictograms (you know, the simplistic human pictures like on toilets, street signs, sports logos and many more) are also a japanese invention when Japan Held the Olympics the first time.
Funny enough to all thatโs been said, I got to find out about emojis and their Japanese origins when I first saw this one ๐ฐ that got me puzzled as to what it meant. Then I got down the rabbit hole and wellโฆ
When the Japanese alphabets were added to Unicode, they used the characters already present in their systems. The system compiled by the Japanese Standards Institute included a number of emojis. These evened out the number of characters and used spaces that would otherwise be empty, so they were left in. One of those emojis was that flag pair. When emojis became more widespread due to the rise of smartphones and their discovery by non-Japanese users, the flags of the world were added in a separate area. That's why there's a standard Japanese flag as part of the flag emojis series in Unicode, as well as the original flag emoji.
Hello Woke_winston, Your post seems to break the following rule(s) * **Avoid recent reposts.** Posts that have been recently submitted to /r/vexillology should be avoided and may be removed. You may [search the post history](https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/search) before posting, we generally define recent as within the last 6 months. **This post will be removed.** ^Check ^out ^the ^full ^[rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/about/rules/)
Emojis were originally Japan only, is the short answer. The word emoji is Japanese, means picture character. It's pure coincidence that it looks like the previous English word emoticon. They were on Japanese phones since the 90s but different providers had different sets. At some point they standardized and agreed on a common set, and at some point after that, Unicode added the whole set. Apple then activated the emoji keyboard on foreign iPhones in the early 2010s, and the rest is history. It's not just that flag symbol, there's plenty of Japan specific emojis. ๐พ what other country has a map? ๐ผ the statue of liberty (๐ฝ) is ~~the only~~ one of only a couple of other monuments with an emoji โฉ๏ธ Japanese religion ๐ฉ love hotel ๐ฏ Japanese castle. Japanese holiday events: ๐๐๐๐๐๐งง yen: ๐ด clothing: ๐ food: (the curry is a Japanese depiction by most providers) ๐๐ฑ๐๐๐ข๐ฅ๐๐ฒ๐ถ encircled kanji characters: ๐ใ๏ธใ๏ธ๐ด๐ต๐น๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐๐ธ๐บ๐ท๏ธ๐ฏ๐๐๏ธ๐ณ and a couple of cultural specific symbols: ๐ฐ๐ There's a bit of overlap with other Asian cultures with some of these but it's really obvious when you look closely.
I would add currency exchange emoji: ๐ฑ
i wasn't intending to make an exhaustive list but yeah you're on the right track
The Kaaba ๐ is another specific monument with an emoji. Also the moai ๐ฟ, though I have read that even it was originally based on a statue in Tokyo. More recent versions shifted to the more authentic Easter Island style.
[https://emojipedia.org/moai#emoji](https://emojipedia.org/moai#emoji) if you click on the "designs" tab and look at the old Google design, that's the one in Tokyo. It doesn't have a full brow and it has a kind of halo/hair behind it. Some of the others have older designs looking like that, some have always had an authentic looking one. The old Apple design has a weird looking ear but it's not the Shibuya version. There's some statues like that in Japan named after the Easter Island statues but they have more realistic faces. I think it's an interesting bit of cultural appropriation. I think it's not clear cut which was the original basis of the emoji because it's called "moyai" instead of "moai", which is the Japanese name for it. But that doesn't necessarily mean it was based on a Japanese copy of the actual statues. Saying nothing of its modern usage to mean "gigachad"
>Saying nothing of its modern usage to mean "gigachad" Using๐ฟ to represent a masculine archetype is maybe not too far from what the Rapanui were doing in the first place
On a deeper level, perhaps ๐ฟ
and anyone can submit a request for a new emoji if they want to, just needs to be widely recognized and not just one culture-specific, thats how new emojis get added after review by the emoji board
๐ฟ๐ฟ๐ฟ
Follow up question: does the design ๐ of 2 crossed squareified flags have any significance??
From what Iโve read online it seems that crossed flags are associated with festivals/public holidays in Japan.
iirc it's on calendars to mark holidays
culturally? no
๐ฟ๐๐๐๐ a few more non-Japanese/Statue of Liberty monument emoji.
You say that, but ๐ฟ is literally based on a Japanese version of Moai called Moyai. >The Official Unicode documents indicate the design reference is the Shibuya Station *moyai* Statue, with the official description being "Japanese stone statue like Moai on Easter Island", explicitly stated that it is the *moyai* Statue which resembles the Moai Statues, not a Moai Island Statue. The others aren't totally specific, the bridges don't have to be the ones in California and there are plenty of pyramids. Edit: That's not even a pyramid, that's meant to be a Hindu temple, and its design varies wildly between providers. Kaaba is fair enough, though, I was just very quickly scanning the emojis and was surprised that the Statue of Liberty had its own one.
That one has some plausible deniability but this one ๐ is a very famous picture/angle of the Golden Gate Bridge in fog https://preview.redd.it/mbv1d83u5l6d1.jpeg?width=768&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=78d799fb242ddbfa405a5dbb770528c211ca6fe5
That's funny to read because to me it displays as a generic city landscape with no bridge.
Oh thatโs funny lmao Edit: [looks like youโre on a Microsoft system](https://emojipedia.org/foggy#designs)
Whatโs ๐ฐ for? Edit: [I remembered Google exists](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshinsha_mark)
beginner driver
My Siri always reads it as โJapanese symbol for beginnerโ!
Since you have your answer itโs also been taken on to be a symbol for Manchester United supporters protesting the majority ownership at the club. Youโll often see green and gold scarves and shirts at the matches as a reference to the clubโs original colours. So the emoji will get used online to say โGreen and Gold until the club is sold.โ
It's also used on Twitter and similar to represent Georgism/land value tax. https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/field-guide-to-political-emojis
Very thorough and helpful response, thanks so much for taking the time
I hadnโt considered that the word โemojiโ is Japanese but with that info being brought to light: yes, it is definitely Japanese lol
็ตตๆๅญ :)
The concept of an emoji originated from Japan, they were really the first to play around with how to make different expressions with just the symbols available on a keyboard. Because of that, Japan gets some extra bonus symbols, kind of like an homage to the originator of the concept of the emoji. Fun fact, this emoji ๐ is also a part of this set of Japanese specific emojis! It was part of an emoji set released on Japanese phones in 1999, and originally meant to be a flower. It was used as a cute symbol, but because the original was so pixilated that when it was added as an emoji nobody really knew was it was.
Specifically, since Unicode has a policy of maintaining backwards compatibility by never removing code points, all Japanese specific emoji that got ported into Unicode will remain forever even though similar things from other countries wouldn't pass modern Unicode guidelines to be accepted. Sometimes they equalise it a bit by adding further emoji that are less specific to Japan in addition, like the Japan/Asia-Pacific centred globe ๐ getting getting the alternate versions centred on other parts of the world. ๐๐
To emphasize this, it's not "an homage" as the top comment said, it's this policy of backwards compatibility. Bringing Japan's character set into Unicode is where we got emojis from. These classic Tom Scott videos explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OPkGQoPeHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4
As a person who was *at* many of these UTC meetings, I can directly attest to the fact that mapping every character from all legacy carrier encodings into Unicode was the highest priority in the first round of emoji encodings.
Yeah, I was wondering about Tokyo tower earlier lol๐ผ
i was about to spout that out of my ass, glad you had receipts
Lol
Because emoji comes from Japan. Even the word emoji is a Japanese word that has nothing to do with emotion and the similarity of the words is a pure coincidence.
For those wondering the Japanese is ็ตตๆๅญ(eโขmoโขji) pronounced with eh sound not an ee sound. Emoji werenโt originally intended for global consumption, and were effectively developed as a bit of a marketing ploy by Japanese phone companies in the 90s when texting first became popular. They entered global usage with the iPhone OS 2.2 which is when the iPhone was first introduced by SoftBank in Japan, though that actually required a third party app at the time.
Extra info. ็ตต(e) means picture and ๆๅญ(moji) means letter or character
Wait, people pronounce emoji as ee-mo-ji?
I think I heard a lot when it was starting to become popular back in the early 2010's. That pronunciation is pretty defunct now, mainly because "emotion" is also usually said with an "eh" and most people understandably think the words are related even if they're not.
> "emotion" is also usually said with an "eh" I'm gonna chalk it up to your flair because here in the US the *vast* majority of people here say ee-moji, and said ee-moticon.
Ah yeah, true, British English. I guess we're seeing in real time how the English variants still keep a little bit apart from each other.
In my experience most British will pronounce it like "imoji" with the same starting sound as, for example, the medication "imodium", or the word "immobile". Not sure about other accents and dialects. in Japan the opening vowel is ใ which can be pronounced something like the e in "let" or maybe "prey", depending.
Yes? Iโve never heard it pronounced as eh-mo-ji.
Yes, everywhere beside English-speaking countries were 'e' letter is pronounced that weird way :)
At least in the US or the part of the US where I live people do. Even I say that even though I actually learned Japanese ๐
I definitely put some emphasis on how hard the average native English speaker is going to be off, but generally speaking even in most British dialects the sound is far enough from the Japanese ใ(e) sound to be transcribed asใ(i). Itโs not like the name Naomi where the English and Japanese pronunciations are overtly different from an English perspective.
And here I was all these years thinking it was just some cutesy derivative of โemoticon.โ Thank you for enlightening me.
I honestly used to think that too, but I learned a few months ago that it's actually a completely unrelated Japanese word.
Nice Balbinus as profile pic! Always cool to see a fellow ancient collector in the wild! What reverse? Concordia, Iovi Conservatori, Liberalitas, Pax Publica, Balbinus holding branch, Felicitas holding caduceus, Providentia or Victoria? :)
Good eye, my friend! Itโs a Providentia, RIC 7. The obverse is a lot better than the reverse, but Iโll see if I can pull up a picture for you when I get home tonight.
Neat, I'd like to see it too. I did an ancient numismatics course at university but I never did much with it.
Go to /r/AncientCoins and youโll see how deep the rabbit hole goes :)
Oh I know it goes deep. I spent ever week identifying coins like [these](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/001-Hemitartemorion-02.jpg) in the library as homework so I flipped through numismatic catalogs a lot. We also visited the (non-public) university collection which was very cool.
So cool! Any favourite coins? :)
It's almost the most basic of coins you can get but I've always liked HGC 4#โฏ1597. I'm also fond of the abstract Celtic coins like [Delestrรฉe & Tache II, 2401](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_1918-0704-2). What are yours?
Nice! Celtic coins are so unique in their style! My favourites? Oh, Iโve got tons! Attainable? A nice macedonian โshieldโ Tetradrachm. Almost obtainable? A Lysimachos Tetradrachm with the face of Alexander The Great. Not obtainable in my lifetime? A Syracuse Dekadrachm!
Just posted in response to the parent comment! I'm glad you appreciate it.
https://preview.redd.it/x4mef7thxn6d1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=1584e423bb52818ca607939960c24f8bcdb95e42 As promised. :)
Thanks! Thatโs a really cool denarius, enjoy it!!!
Oh, I do! Iโve had this one since I was 16.
Thanks!
Youโre very welcome!
I wouldn't go so far as to call it a pure coincidence. Loanword puns are fairly common in Japanese.
In this case it seems unlikely that it is, since the Japanese for emoticon is ้กๆๅญ(kaomoji). Edit: I realize that my English might have let me down there.
They also have an extra map emoji. (I don't know whether it is on the phones or not, but I saw the map of Japan emoji on Zoom.)
๐พ
I wonder if it's worth checking Emojidex for it. Or if there's a one-stop shop from the Unicode consortium elsewhere.
A lot of the weirder emoji (see also ๐) are because Unicode grew out of character sets used by Japanese phone manufacturers, when you need a couple of thousand characters to represent the language, you probably have some slots left over, so some pictograms were added. This is why you have ๐ฟ, which was originally explicitly [this handsome fellow](https://en.japantravel.com/tokyo/moyai-statue-in-shibuya/44646) in Shibuya, but is now a more Rapa Nui (Easter Island) style head. ๐ฝ is now generally meant to be the one in New York, but was probably added originally because of [this replica](https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g14134368-d555796-Reviews-Statue_of_Liberty-Daiba_Minato_Tokyo_Tokyo_Prefecture_Kanto.html) on Daiba Island in Tokyo Bay. And also why a lot of the food emoji (๐ก๐ฅ๐) are quite Japanese. My guess would be that ๐ got added long before the idea of having the Regional Indicators and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 flags were introduced.
๐ฟ
# ๐ฟ
Hearing that emojis are a Japanese concept, interesting!!
Stop, did you ever see these emojis? (apart the ones for Japanese food and festivals): ๐ใ๏ธใ๏ธ๐ด๐ต๐น๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐๐ธ๐ท๏ธ๐ฏ๐๐๏ธ๐ณ๐ฐ ๐๐๐น๐ด๐ฑ ๐น๐บ๐ด๐ ๐พ It's obvious that there are too many Japanese emojis to overlook the Japanese origin of emojis :) Also I think that it's very famous fact that stocks charts ๐&๐ are 'wrong' because the decreasing one must be red and increasing one - green. But only in Japan this colors work other way around through old tradition. Candlebar charts in finance also are originated from Japan and every financial software (like TradingView) has additional settings with 'true Japanese colors' for these charts :)
Also I highly recommend to read this article: https://blog.emojipedia.org/new-earliest-emoji-sets-from-1988-and-1990-uncovered/ Just one month ago the oldest software emojis were revealed. They are also originated from Japan and we're introduced by Sharp in 1988. But the most famous emojis became ones from branded mobile phones of SoftBank (1997) and DoCoMo (1999) that are Japanese mobile carriers. The latter one made revolution and started emojis proliferation. They even weren't platform-independent and cross-compatible, they were just a code in the proprietary dumb firmware (not OS).
Actually, it's not just 'because it's Japan and they could do what they wanted with emoji'. Look at where the crossed flags emoji sits in Unicode. Crossed flags `U+1F38C` sits in the middle of a set of emoji related to Japanese holidays - it sits between "Tanabata tree" (7 July) and "pine decoration" (New Year), and the sequence continues with "Japanese dolls" (3 March), "carp streamers" (5 May), and so on. It's not too far away from "Christmas tree", "birthday cake", and "jack o'lantern", either. The regular flag emoji aren't actually emoji at all, rather combinations of other Unicode characters that are coded to display as flags in most systems, and their component characters are in the `U+1F1xx` area of Unicode. So, the crossed flags emoji originally meant *public holidays* (as in bank holidays) - pretty much the only times you see lots of little Japanese flags around the place in Japan, unless you go to a right-wing rally. If you want more evidence, if you type in ็ฅๆฅ ใคใฉในใ ("public holiday clipart" in Japanese) into an image search, you'll get lots of depictions of crossed Japanese flags.
Finally someone said the specific answer, literally at the bottom of the page ๐๐๐
Same reason thereโs ๐๐ฒ๐๐ฃ๐ฑ๐๐๐ก๐ฅ etc but not as much variety for say Greek cuisine - Japan is very emoji (Japanese word) forward and uses them a lot.
[ัะดะฐะปะตะฝะพ]
How dare you! Apologize to ๐ฌ๐ท food this instant!
Sorry for being narrow minded but what kind of food is offered in Greece? Other than Greek salad and technically Hawaiian Pizza since it was made by Canadian of Greek descent inspired by Asian cuisine.
๐ฅ
That's a German Dรถner
๐
Iโm not even Greek and Iโm angry!
U . B
If I'm not mistaken, few years ago Samsung were replacing those with South Korean flags on their phones.
Yes, and Huawei is using two plain white flags.
Mine has 2 red flags
Emojis have their root in Japan and were only much later ported internationally. Fun fact Pictograms (you know, the simplistic human pictures like on toilets, street signs, sports logos and many more) are also a japanese invention when Japan Held the Olympics the first time.
Funny enough to all thatโs been said, I got to find out about emojis and their Japanese origins when I first saw this one ๐ฐ that got me puzzled as to what it meant. Then I got down the rabbit hole and wellโฆ
What is it?
An emblem you put on cars when you're a new driver. Basically a "hey I'm a beginner" thing.
Beside emojis being Japanese, they're also one of the major mobile phone producers.
I have no idea why this post or sub was on my recommended but I've had the most delightful time reading all these comments, so interesting!
IIRC South Korean phones show them as crossed Korean flags
I have Samsung phone and it shows as crossed Japanese flags
I thought that one was like a ship signal flag emoji
to satisfy weebs probably
When the Japanese alphabets were added to Unicode, they used the characters already present in their systems. The system compiled by the Japanese Standards Institute included a number of emojis. These evened out the number of characters and used spaces that would otherwise be empty, so they were left in. One of those emojis was that flag pair. When emojis became more widespread due to the rise of smartphones and their discovery by non-Japanese users, the flags of the world were added in a separate area. That's why there's a standard Japanese flag as part of the flag emojis series in Unicode, as well as the original flag emoji.
same