The Japanese mobile internet service that used Shigetaka Kurita’s 1999 emoji set was i-mode.
NTT DoCoMo developed i-mode as a mobile internet platform in Japan. To make compact phone communication more expressive, Kurita and his team designed 176 pictograms, each built on a 12-by-12-pixel grid. The set included weather, transport, food, symbols, and faces, and was introduced for i-mode around 1999.
Kurita drew inspiration from manga’s visual conventions, Chinese characters, weather symbols, and street signs. The pictograms were designed to add emotional and contextual information that plain text could not easily convey on small mobile screens. Their compact format suited the limitations of early phones and mobile networks.
i-mode is often confused with other Japanese carrier services or later Western emoji systems. Vodafone Live, EZweb, and SkyWalker were separate services. Kurita’s set also was not identical to today’s Unicode emoji: many modern emoji descend from multiple Japanese carrier sets, and Unicode later standardized cross-platform character identity rather than one company’s artwork.