Introduction
Hi, I’m Satomi. I’ve just come back to London after almost two years away. This is the first video I’ve filmed here. And when I text my friends here, one thing I keep noticing is that they don’t really use emoji that much. So today I’d like to talk about emoji culture in Japan, and what goes through my mind, as a Japanese person, when I’m messaging people in the UK. It goes deeper than you might think, so do stay with me until the end.
Did you know that ’emoji’ is actually a Japanese word? ‘E’ means picture, and ‘moji’ means character.
A Small Screen
Emoji were born in Japan in the late nineties. In the early days, they were mostly little pixel-art pictures, and I remember everyone using them. But why did something like emoji come from Japan in the first place? Can you guess the deeper reason behind it?
Pictures and Words Belong Together
A while ago, I read a book by the art historian Shuji Takashina, and there was a part that went something like this.
In the West, pictures were painted with a soft brush, while words were written with a pen that had a hard tip. So there was a sense that pictures and words belonged to different worlds. Even in medieval manuscripts, pictures were either decorative borders around the text, or drawn in spaces set aside for them. They didn’t really mix with the words.
When printing spread in the fifteenth century, text was set in movable type, and illustrations were cut into wood. So words and pictures were even made in separate ways. And it’s said that the first attempt in the West to arrange words into a picture came in the twentieth century, with a poetry collection by Apollinaire called Calligrammes.
In Japan, on the other hand, you could write words and paint pictures with the same brush. So there’s a strong sense that pictures and words belong together. The Edo period ran from around 1600 until the 1860s. In that time, ukiyo-e prints and illustrated books were made from woodblocks. The picture and the text were carved together into one piece of wood. Takashina writes that this was probably because Japanese people didn’t like separating pictures from words.
Reading that, it somehow felt natural to me that emoji were born in Japan, too.
The Invention of Hiragana
Another clue is the Japanese writing system itself. Japan uses characters that came from China, called kanji. But it also has its own script, which works a bit like an alphabet, and that’s hiragana. Hiragana grew out of writing kanji in a looser, flowing way, and if you look at it, there isn’t a single straight line.
And from around the tenth century, people in Japan wrote short poems called waka in hiragana. They’d scatter the lines across beautifully patterned paper, making the writing itself look like a picture. The author Seigou Matsuoka talks about this in his book The Essence of Japanese Culture. He calls it a revolution in calligraphy, and in design, too.
My Emoji
Also, this is just my own feeling, but I think Japanese people use more exclamation marks than people here do. You see lots of them even on public warning signs. But as with emoji, I think things like exclamation marks are partly there to make a conversation feel a little warmer. Sometimes, when someone adds an emoji or exclamation mark like that, it feels like a small gesture of kindness. And I appreciate that.
By the way, the most popular messaging app in Japan is LINE, which is a bit like WhatsApp here. And on LINE, people send each other big stickers. People even buy sticker sets and collect them. Knowing all this history, I think people’s love of stickers is very Japanese as well.
And even before emoji and stickers, people were creating all sorts of pictures out of keyboard symbols, including faces called kaomoji. They were already around in the 1980s. They’re pictures drawn with characters too, aren’t they? So it makes sense to me that kaomoji caught on in Japan.
Looking back at the messages I’ve sent, I can see I use things like clovers and face emojis a lot. For me, emojis are a way to make sure my message doesn’t come across as too cold to the person reading it. Sometimes I even think about the impression the colour of the emoji might give them.
xx in London
As I said at the start, when I text my friends here in London, I notice they don’t use emojis as much as my friends in Japan. Instead, they end their messages with xx (kisses). I don’t know if it’s because I’m Japanese, but to me, xx sometimes feels a bit lighter than an emoji, partly because it’s so easy to add, and partly because it has no colour.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in the country where emojis were born, and I’ve used them since primary school, but a message without a picture feels a bit lonely to me.
Closing
This is just my own guess. In Japan, harmony is important. But I get the impression that in places like Britain or America, being a strong individual matters more. So I sometimes wonder if emoji come across as too casual there, and that’s why people don’t use them.
If you don’t use emoji, I’d love to know why. And when you get a message with emoji in it, how does it make you feel? Do let me know in the comments.
Whether it’s a conversation, an object or a space, I hope the things I share with you will have a little human warmth. I’d love them to make you feel a bit happier. I want to keep working hard to make things like that.
Thank you, as always, for watching. On Substack, I write about things I couldn’t fit into my videos. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them, or listening to them as a podcast. See you next time.
