Emojis may be one of Japan’s greatest-ever exports ... to-face encounters is largely absent in a digital setting. Digital text-speak alone is impoverished, seemingly possessing the power ...

“When it comes to text-based communication ... The first round of what came to be called emoji—a Japanese neologism that means, more or less, “picture word”—were designed by Kurita ...

Japan’s largest telecommunications operator NTT Docomo Inc. announced on May 21 that it is discontinuing its "Docomo Emoji" ...

the standard that governs the software coding of text. That year, 722 emoji were released on both iPhone and Android. “In Japan, they were a big hit right away, but the use of emoji overseas ...

There are now about 1,800 emoji characters -- and ... "It wasn't only Japanese who felt inconvenienced when they were exchanging text messages. We were all feeling the same thing," he tells ...

In 1999, the first emojis were created by a Japanese artist named Shigetaka Kurita, who found inspiration in manga. They were designed to facilitate text-based communication; NTT DoCoMo ...

This keyboard was available on Japanese devices since 2008 ... Part of the charm of using emoji in text conversations is that they leave something to the imagination — they force the sender ...

Japanese, Korean and Lithuanian. But the latest translation eschews the written word altogether, telling the story through emoji icons—the pictograms seen in text messages and e-mails.