The First Emoji Set Wasn't Kurita's
For two decades, NTT DoCoMo's 1999 set was called the first. The actual first shipped two years earlier on a phone almost nobody bought.
On November 1, 1997, J-Phone (now SoftBank) shipped the SkyWalker DP-211SW with 90 monochrome emoji rendered on a 12x12-pixel grid: numbers, sports, weather, moon phases, a smile, and the small brown swirl that would eventually become the Pile of Poo. The word emoji appears in the manual. It is the first confirmed use of the term to describe these characters anywhere in the world.
The DP-211SW sold badly. The emoji set didn't propagate to later J-Phone models, so most Japanese phone owners never saw it. Two years later, in February 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode with Shigetaka Kurita's 176-emoji set, which rode the runaway success of i-mode into every Japanese phone in the country. Apple eventually licensed SoftBank's lineage for the iPhone, including the Poo and the heart-eyes faces that carried the older DNA, but the credit for inventing emoji went to Kurita.
Kurita himself corrected the record. In a January 2019 tweet, he wrote that DoCoMo wasn't the first to ship emoji on a mobile phone: "I think it was J-PHONE DP-211SW." Emojipedia has since updated its history to match.
The lesson is older than emoji. The first version of a thing, if it sells four thousand units, gets buried under the version that sold forty million. Kurita designed a beautiful, well-considered set in a month under brutal pixel constraints, and he deserves the museum acquisition MoMA gave him. He just wasn't first.
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