Japan. Docomo abandons its emojis, the first to conquer the world. “We’ve done our part”

After 26 years of honorable service, the Japanese telecommunications company NTT Docomo says goodbye to the original emoji, making room for the most common ones from the main search engines and telephone operators.

Starting this month, in fact, smartphones and Android phones marketed in the Land of the Rising Sun by the carrier will no longer be equipped with the classic set of Docomo pictograms. The new cell phones will instead adopt the Noto Color Emoji symbols from Google or Samsung.

The excitement in the Land of the Rising Sun

The small graphic icons of Docomo were introduced in 1999 with an "i-mode" service of mobile telephony compatible with the Internet, in which Shigetaka Kurita, a graphic designer who worked for the company, now 53 years old and who is responsible for the drawings, participated. Often considered the first emoji in history, in reality they were anticipated by a couple of years by those created, also in Japan, by J-Phone, a telephone operator of Softbank. The latter, although they later inspired the design of Apple's emojis, were not particularly successful and widespread. Ninety characters, in black and white, a structure with a large pixel "grain", were abandoned in 2016.

The first to establish themselves everywhere

The Docomo emojis are instead 176, in color, and have had a very different fate, becoming the standard first in Japan and then in the world, starting from the beginning of the 2000s, especially - but not only - among teenagers. Arriving about twenty years after the first emoticons - whose origin dates back, according to some sources, to 1982, according to others even to 1907, they have, in their various evolutions, dominated the scene for over a decade, then being gradually overtaken and replaced by the current ones. Now the Japanese company plans to definitively end the service within the year. The Japanese company has declared that it has "played its role", underlining that modern emojis have found a wider diffusion on a global level.

They have a place at the Moma in New York

It is useless to recall how successful this form of transmission of emotions has been in enriching digital communication, where it has brought effective and immediate representations, among others, of emotions, objects, animals, places and symbols,

A language that started with young people but then took hold globally, becoming a universal visual language. So much so that in 2016 the set of 176 emojis by Ntt Docomo was included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.