With Heart: Emoji Interpreters

In 1995, a tiny pixelated heart on a Japanese pager became the most important thing on the screen. When it disappeared, young people left. One man never forgot and went on to draw the original 176 emoji.     

In this episode:

• Pocket Bells and goroawase: how Japanese teenagers turned numbers on pagers into a language of their own
• The heart: the small symbol on NTT Docomo's Pocket Bell, and what happened when a new business model took it away
• Shigetaka Kurita: the former pager salesman with no design training who was given five weeks to draw the original 12x12 pixel emoji for i-mode
• Unicode and HEAVY BLACK HEART: how emoji became part of a shared standard in 2010, and why the red heart carries such a strange formal name
• The Museum of Modern Art: how Kurita's designs became part of MoMA's collection, and why an emoji means whatever we make it mean     

Episode Music:

• Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • Possibility
  • Freedom to Speak
  • Bones   

Additional Reading:

McLaughlin, A. (2018, May 2). Emoji: Documenting design history’s accidental masterpiece. Design Week. https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/30-april-6-may-2018/emoji-documenting-design-history-accidental-masterpiece/

McCurry, J. (2016, October 27). The inventor of emoji on his famous creations and his all-time favorite. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/27/emoji-inventor-shigetaka-kurita-moma-new-york-text

Museum of Modern Art. (2016). Inbox: The original emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita. MoMA exhibition page. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3639

Museum of Modern Art. (2025). Shigetaka Kurita: Emoji. 1998–99. MoMA collection entry. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/196070

Okada, Y. (2018, December 3). ポケベル全盛期、わたしは女子高生だった [I was a high school girl during the pager boom]. ITmedia NEWS. ITmedia article. https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/article/1812/03/1181203094/

The Unicode Consortium. (2026). Unicode emoji (Unicode Technical Standard No. 51, Version 18.0). https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/ 

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