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Japan Times
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
An emoji used to say it all. Now it might say too much.
Can't find the right way to express nuance in a text? Then add on an 絵文字 (emoji). Before 絵文字 and 顔文字 (kaomoji, emoticons) — the little faces we create with コロン (koron, colons), 括弧 (kakko, parentheses) and other such punctuation ;) — became ubiquitous in our communications, you always ran the risk that the person you were sending a text or email to wouldn't know if you were joking, sympathizing or celebrating the message you were trying to convey. 絵文字 and 顔文字 have been incredibly helpful in this regard. So that's why July 17 has been dubbed 世界絵文字デー (Sekai Emoji Dē, World Emoji Day) by Emojipedia, a day to honor this graphic evolution in the way we communicate. Why July 17? Well, Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge picked the date displayed on the 絵文字 representing a カレンダー (karendā, calendar). The reason July 17 is the date on the カレンダーの絵文字 (karendā no emoji, calendar emoji) is because that's the date Apple initially announced its iCal, a predecessor to the Calendar app many of us use today. The first widely recognized set of 176 emojis was released not by Apple but by Japanese mobile phone operator NTT Docomo 26 years ago. The 12×12 pixel ドコモ絵文字 (Dokomo emoji, Docomo emoji) encouraged users to insert colorful pictograms into their emails as a way to replace entire words and add nuance at the 文末 (bunmatsu, end of a sentence). British linguistics professor Vyvyan Evans said in a 2015 interview with the BBC that 絵文字はその驚異的な普及率と進化の速度 から、歴史上最も急速に広がった言語形態だ (Emoji wa sono kyōi-tekina fukyū ritsu to shinka no sokudo kara, rekishijō mottomo kyūsoku ni hirogatta gengo keitai da, Emoji is the fastest growing form of language in history based on its incredible adoption rate and speed of evolution). Here we are 10 years later with hundreds of ways to express ourselves. However, while Japanese in their 30s and 40s still sprinkle 絵文字 into their messages, the style is now considered おばさん構文 (obasan kōbun, middle-aged women's style texting). This change in digital etiquette mimics other trends such as how 句点 (kuten, periods) can be seen as rude among young Japanese professionals and how a thumbs-up emoji can offend Gen Z texters overseas. Likewise, the custom of putting an emoji at the end of your Japanese texts is starting to fade. Last April, a woman in her 30s shared a surprising experience related to 絵文字 and スタンプ (sutanpu, digital stickers) on the messaging app Line. She texted to celebrate her niece's スマホデビュー (sumaho debyū, smartphone debut) with a smiley 顔文字 and two red heart stickers. The response from her niece? 「落ち着いて 」 (ochitsuite, calm down) — with no 句点, emojis or stickers. For digital native young people who constantly chat online, texts overloaded with 絵文字 can feel a bit over the top. That being said, 絵文字は今や文章に遊び心を足すだけにとどまらず、返信代わりの手段としても使われています (Emoji wa ima ya bunshō ni asobigokoro o tasu dake ni todomarazu, henshin-gawari no shudan to shitemo tsukawarete-imasu, Emojis are now used not only to add humor to text but also as a substitute for replies). In the above sentence, the structure ～にとどまらず (~ni todomarazu, not limited to~ but also) is used to imply the role of 絵文字 goes beyond adding personality to messages. It is derived from the negative form of the verb 留まる (tomaru/todomaru), which translates as to stop, to stay and not to exceed a boundary, as in 滞在先に留まる (taizai-saki ni todomaru, to stay at [one's] accommodation). As an elder Millennial, I grew up meticulously decorating my email texts with pictures, but 絵文字 have since evolved from cute extras to communication essentials. In May, Line unlocked options for リアクション機能 (riakushon kinō, reaction features). This raised the number of choices there from six to more than 240,000, including both official and paid クリエイターズ絵文字 (kurieitāzu emoji, creator emoji) that are made by individuals and approved by LINE. This リアクション機能 function is used 25 million times a day in Japan alone, with half of those users hitting the いいね (ii ne, like) option before the change. It's no wonder that いいね has now become a verb in Japanese: いいねする (ii ne suru, to give a like). Using an 絵文字 to react to something on most apps no longer results in a 通知 (tsūchi, notification) to the receiver, which is convenient when having a グループトーク (gurūpu tōku, group talk) with multiple members. However, if you're in a thread with only one other person, your friend may think, いいねだけでなく返信があればいいのに (Ii ne dake de naku henshin ga areba ii noni, It would be better to have a reply, not just a like). The formal compound particle ～だけでなく (~dake de naku, not only~) works similarly to ～にとどまらず in this example. Just note that it often becomes ～だけじゃなく (~dake janaku) in everyday conversation. For example, a couple of years ago, a now-deleted Reddit post drew mixed reactions by stating: 皆いいねだけじゃなくて他の絵文字も使うとか、「素晴らしい！」って返信すればいいのに (Minna ii ne dake janakute hoka no emoji mo tsukau toka, subarashii-tte henshin sureba ii noni, It'd be better if everyone didn't just hit like, but used different emojis or replied with 'Great!'). In this case, ～だけじゃなく is joined later in the sentence by the particle も (mo), too/also) to create the 'not only ... but also' structure. According to Emojipedia, last year's three most-used 絵文字 were 嬉し泣きの顔 (ureshi naki no kao, face with tears of joy) — the Oxford Word of the Year 2015, 赤いハート (akai hāto, red heart) and 目がハートの顔 (me ga hāto no kao, face with heart eyes). This ranking reflects Japanese usage, too, however it's worth noting that the ぴえん (pien, pleading face emoji with big puppy dog eyes) is also quite popular in Japan. ぴえんは悲しい気分だけでなく感激の意味でも使われます (Pien wa kanashii kibun dake de naku kangeki no imi demo tsukawaremasu, The pleading face emoji is used not only to express sadness but also a sense of being deeply touched). So make sure to give a thought to those little pictures on your phone this 世界絵文字デー, there's so much more available than just the いいねの絵文字 (ii ne no emoji, thumbs up emoji).
Telegraph
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Love emojis? Their history is wild and controversial
The history of emojis begins with love. In mid-1990s Japan, sales of pagers – poke beru, or 'pocket bells' – were thriving. The average teenager couldn't yet afford a mobile phone, but pagers were far cheaper. Almost half of Japanese schoolgirls had one. Every night, the networks hummed with adolescent yearning. Yet their communications were confined to a crude numerical interface. As a result, Japan's youth developed ciphers: '999', understood as 'three nines' or san kyu, sounded out the English 'thank you', while '888' or ha ha ha became a shorthand giggle. In 1996, to keep up with competitors encroaching on its market share, NTT Docomo, the country's largest mobile provider, produced a slew of new devices. And some of those allowed their users to send a cute graphic symbol: a tiny heart. It's hardly surprising that emojis caught on where they did. 'Japanese culture and public life are suffused with visual symbolism,' writes Keith Houston in his delightful history, Face with Tears of Joy. Hence, when the Docomo engineer Shigetaka Kurita sat down to design an initial batch of 176 rudimentary emojis, he was able to draw inspiration from existing pictorial systems such as emoticons – for example, ;-) – and the 'face-characters' known as kao-moji – for example, ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) – not to mention the conventions of manga. Many of the emojis on your smartphone today descend from the manpu of Japanese comic-books: visual tropes that express states of being. By the mid-2000s, a decade later, Japan had become gripped by emoji-mania. Yet those little icons hadn't yet leapt across to the West. Only when Google prepared to roll out Gmail across Asia did its product managers recognise the importance of offering support for the symbols. The 'pile of poo' emoji – based, we learn from Houston, on a 1980s anime character called 'Poop Boy' – caused momentary queasiness in the boardroom, until executives studied the data, and saw that it was the most beloved icon of the lot. Apple had a similar epiphany. When the iPhone made its Tokyo debut in 2008, Masayoshi Son – CEO of Apple's Japanese partner, Softbank – convinced Steve Jobs that these smiley faces were a sine qua non for technology in Asia. Still, there were bigger problems to overcome than propriety. Emojis may appear as pictures, but in reality they're transmitted as numerical codes, interpreted on arrival by your phone, which then displays symbols with which its software is compatible. This makes practical sense, as true images are data-costly. But in the early days of emojis, the codes weren't yet standardised between service providers and mobile devices. One texter's 'face with cowboy hat' could therefore be another's 'meat on bone'. Enter the Unicode Consortium – the Linnaeus of emoji history. Back in 1987, the founders of this group, managers of multilingual projects at Apple and Xerox, had looked at the state of computing and seen it as Babel after the fall. A lack of industry-wide standards had led to mutually unintelligible systems of digital communication. Software couldn't speak to software. 'Sending a computer file from one part of the world to a different one,' Houston writes, 'often resulted in a mess of mangled text.' The experts therefore embarked on uniform encoding: a library of distinct tags for each character of every writing system on earth. Today, thanks to Unicode, whether an 'A' appears in Garamond or Comic Sans, bolded or italicised, beneath all the fancy dress it will always be U+0041. Two decades on, they wondered: what if a similar standard could be set for emojis? A rose would need no other codename than U+1F339. Global compatibility could bloom. Unicode 6.0, the first version to support emojis, debuted in 2010. Like botanists sorting and classing specimens, the consortium only included emojis already present in an ecosystem. This explains the initial glut of figures from Japanese culture and folklore, as well as the pleasant preponderance of cats. But as emojis became a global language, new communities sought representation. Pressure came from both individuals and corporate entities. The journalist Jennifer 8 Lee lobbied for a dumpling emoji; Taco Bell wanted its eponymous finger food; the Spanish comedian Eugeni Alemany, backed by a rice company, demanded that paella be immortalised in 16 bits. All three got their way, and had their emoji added to Unicode – and therefore your phone. Nonetheless, in an era defined by moving fast and breaking things, the mishaps also piled high. For instance, when in 2017 Google made the (frankly insane) decision to layer its emoji burger with the cheese below the meat, users pushed back en masse. Google's CEO Sundar Pichai was forced onto Twitter, doing his best 'man facepalming', and saying: 'Will drop everything else we are doing and address on Monday.' As emojis poured onto our screens, the 2010s seemed an optimistic time. The launch of an emoji-only social-media platform, Emojli, made international headlines; tennis star Andy Murray consecrated his wedding day with an epithalamion composed solely of emojis; a crowd-funded emoji translation of Moby-Dick went to press. But discontent was festering. Emojis promised to hold up a mirror to the world, but some users saw a past that they were trying to leave behind. The early emoji sets were rather old-fashioned. Men worked construction, served as police officers; women preened, got massages, visited hair salons; children were raised exclusively by heterosexual couples. Above all, there was the problem of ethnic representation: every humanoid emoji had, since Apple's adoption of the system, borne the skin tone of a lemon. There was precedent for this supposedly 'neutral' color: see Lego's sunny figurines or Harvey Ball's iconic 1963 yellow smiley, taken up by AOL Instant Messenger. But yellow, as The Simpsons proves, is very often code for white. 'Journalists and scholars alike concluded that emojis' yellow smileys represented not some race-free ideal but instead a sea of white faces,' says Houston. Unicode 8.0, an update launched in 2015, added a 'skin-tone modifier', allowing bodies to appear in one of five shades derived from the dermatological Fitzpatrick scale – a way of grading skin based on its reaction to ultraviolet light. Yet the choices for hair type and style remain less robust. The curly hair emoji, supposedly applicable to all ethnicities, has been widely critiqued as a poor representation of actual kinky hair. 'These new figures aren't emojis of color,' wrote journalist Paige Tutt in 2015, after the diverse emojis were rolled out, 'they're just white emoji wearing masks.' As Unicode hastened to emoji-fy everything under the sun – including a double-digit number of emojis featuring the Sun itself – a reactionary wing was forming inside the organisation. In 2017, as the consortium responded to proposals for more expressive variations of the beloved 'poop' emoji, the linguist and veteran contributor Michael Everson reached a breaking point: [This] should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence. Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC? Will we have to encode a neutral FACELESS PILE OF POO? He was right, in a way. Emojis' leporine birthrates have slowed in the 2020s, and new Unicode additions often prove unpopular. Despite the consortium's efforts to introduce 53 species of mammal, most of these creatures rarely see the blue light of digital day. Some of this has to do with competition: emotive alternatives are offered by messaging apps such as Line, whose 'Line Friends' stickers include Brown the bear and a rabbit named Cony. The company sells nearly £1 billion of these per year. Houston's history of emojis ends with a plea to gather your rosebuds while you may: 'I cannot shake the idea that emoji as they are right now might just be the best possible version of themselves.' But what, exactly, are they? 'Emojis are not a language, that much is clear,' Houston writes. 'They are something more intriguing and more disruptive than that – they are insurgents within language, a colourful and symbiotic virus whose symptoms we have only haltingly understood.' A writer whose previous books include histories of punctuation symbols and the pocket calculator, Houston is less interested in sociolinguistic details than telling stories. 'Just as Johannes Gutenberg's print press hammered spelling and punctuation into conformity by sheer multiplicative force,' he argues, 'so emojis act as a kind of straitjacket for language, smoothing out what we want to say by restricting what we can say.' According to Adobe, one in three members of Gen Z has ended a relationship by using an emoji. But are emojis actually 'restricting' us? Our writing may, as Houston suggests, become 'moulded to fit the emojis that we have been given', but these little icons in reality provide no proscriptions. 'We' don't use them in a consistent or coherent way. Indeed, though the emoji system is young, it's already clear that it'll never become a single language, an Esperanto for the internet age. Emoji syntax, for instance, varies with the user's mother tongue: studies show that although Mandarin shares the subject-verb-object word order of English, Chinese speakers are more likely to structure emoji phrases as 'You love I' rather than 'I love you'. And the use of emojis often resembles a local argot. Depending on the context, the snowman and horse emojis may be childlike symbols, suggestions for leisure activities, or drug slang. Even 'slightly smiling face' – the seemingly tamest icon – is often deployed as a harrowing expression of condescension. The result is that, even though around 10 billion emojis are sent every day, no one can say with certainty what many of them mean. Consider 'man in business suit levitating' – an emoji imported from the 1990s 'dingbat typeface' Webdings – originally based on a logo depicting the reggae artist Peter Tosh. Journalists trying to explain emojis to their readers have variously assured them that it connotes grumpiness, irony and enthusiasm. Indian users have assumed that it's a picture of the veteran actor Rajinikanth. It means nothing for everyone; it means something to some. All emojis do.
Business Wire
02-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Access Advance 欢迎全球技术领导者加入成为新视频分发专利池的许可方和被许可方
波士顿--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(美国商业资讯)-- Access Advance LLC （'Advance'） 今天宣布其视频分发专利 （'VDP'） 池的首批许可方和被许可方的名单，这是该专利池自今年 1 月宣布推出以来迅速获得市场认可的一个重要里程碑。这些在视频编解码技术领域占有重要地位的大型跨国公司的参与，表明了业界对涵盖 HEVC、VVC、VP9 和 AV1 编解码器的全面许可解决方案的强力支持。 VDP 专利池已成功吸引了包括NTT Docomo、快手科技、腾讯和字节跳动在内的许可方/被许可方。通过为流媒体服务商提供他们所寻求的更简单的编解码技术许可方案，Access Advance期望其VDP专利池将得到广泛采纳，这些许可方和被许可方的加入，标志着这一历程已经开始。被许可方参与VDP专利池，能够即时获得一个覆盖广泛的专利组合的许可，同时受益于根据业务规模调整的固定分级定价结构。 '我们很高兴地欢迎NTT Docomo、快手科技、腾讯和字节跳动成为我们的许可方/被许可方。他们加入 VDP专利池是对我们一站式许可的实际价值的见证，同时也证明了VDP专利池成功地在专利权人和实施人之间取得平衡'Access Advance 首席执行官 Peter Moller 说。'这一里程碑表明，VDP专利池正在履行其承诺，为流媒体服务商提供简便和可预测的许可方案，使他们能够专注于创新和内容交付，而不是复杂的专利谈判。 VDP 专利池还宣布了首批许可方，这些许可方代表着强大且丰富的视频编解码器标准必要专利组合，使得VDP专利池能够为流媒体服务商提供广泛的知识产权覆盖。首批许可方包括以下国际知名的技术领袖，他们的创新对现代视频流媒体的基础设施至关重要： BlackBerry Limited ByteDance Dolby International AB Dolby Laboratories, Inc. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute Ewha University-Industry Collaboration Foundation Hangzhou Boyun Technology Co., Ltd. HFI Innovation Inc. Hyundai Motor Company IBEX PT Holdings IDEAHUB Inc. Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd. JVCKENWOOD Corporation Kia Corporation Koninklijke Philips N.V. KT Corporation Kuaishou Technology Kwangwoon University, Industry-Academic Collaboration Foundation LX Semicon Co., Ltd Mitsubishi Electric Corporation NEC Corporation NTT Docomo, Inc. OP Solutions, LLC SK Telecom Co., Ltd. Tencent America LLC University-Industry Cooperation Foundation of Korea Aerospace University University-Industry Cooperation Group of Kyung Hee University V-Nova Limited XRIS Corporation Additional licensor to be disclosed shortly Additional licensor to be disclosed shortly '这些在业内占有重要地位的公司和专利权人的积极参与是对我们的理念的认可，也表明VDP专利池为市场提供了一个优选方案，满足了市场对平衡专利权人和实施人利益的统一许可解决方案的需求，'Moller补充说。'这些许可方不仅带来了必要的专利组合，还带来了必要的可信度和规模，使VDP池成为全球流媒体服务商的优选许可方案。 Access Advance宣布首批许可方和被许可方，适逢业界在日益寻求向流媒体服务商直接许可视频编解码专利，而这些服务商已从使用被专利覆盖的高效视频编解码器中获益匪浅。Access Advance 的方案旨在更大范围地普及专利技术的使用，同时促进视频编解码技术的持续创新。 Access Advance 正在与更多许可方和被许可方商讨最终协议。未来几天和几周将发布更多公告。此外，VDP 专利池的费率结构已发布到 Access Advance VDP 网站（ licensing@ 联系我们，了解有关该计划的更多信息，包括可用的激励和折扣。 关于 Access Advance： Access Advance LLC 是一家独立的许可管理公司，旨在领导专利池的开发和管理，以许可最重要的基于标准的视频编解码器技术的基本专利。Access Advance 为专利所有者和专利实施者提供了透明、高效的许可机制。 Access Advance 管理 HEVC Advance 专利池，用于许可 H.265/HEVC 技术必需的 25500 多项专利，以及 VVC Advance 专利池，用于许可 VVC/H.266 技术必需的专利。公司的多编解码器桥接协议为参与 HEVC Advance 和 VVC Advance 池的被许可方提供单一版税费率结构。此外，Access Advance 还提供 VDP 池，这是一个全面的视频流服务许可解决方案，涵盖 HEVC、VVC、VP9 和 AV1 编解码器。如需了解更多信息，请访问： 。
23-06-2025
- Business
INTERVIEW: Bank's New Name to Feature 'Docomo'
Newsfrom Japan Tokyo, June 23 (Jiji Press)--The word of 'Docomo' will be included in the name of the Japanese bank that NTT Docomo Inc. last month agreed to acquire, Yoshiaki Maeda, president and CEO of the mobile phone operator, said in an interview. The move is designed to make customers aware that the bank will offer telecommunications and financial services in an integrated way. NTT Docomo plans to acquire a stake of nearly two-thirds in SBI Sumishin Net Bank. Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank will own the remainder. Maeda emphasized that financial business is a key area for NTT Docomo after telecommunications. Banking will be 'in the center' of financial services including credit cards, installment investments and mortgages, he said. [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
23-06-2025
- Business
INTERVIEW: Bank's New Name to Feature Docomo
News from Japan Economy Technology Jun 23, 2025 11:11 (JST) Tokyo, June 23 (Jiji Press)--The word of "Docomo" will be included in the name of the Japanese bank that NTT Docomo Inc. last month agreed to acquire, Yoshiaki Maeda, president and CEO of the mobile phone operator, said in an interview. The move is designed to make customers aware that the bank will offer telecommunications and financial services in an integrated way. NTT Docomo plans to acquire a stake of nearly two-thirds in SBI Sumishin Net Bank. Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank will own the remainder. Maeda emphasized that financial business is a key area for NTT Docomo after telecommunications. Banking will be "in the center" of financial services including credit cards, installment investments and mortgages, he said. [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.] Jiji Press
