Which Japanese mobile service introduced the original 176-emoji set in 1999?

NTT DoCoMo's i-mode introduced the original 176-emoji set in 1999.

The set was created for DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile internet service in Japan, where small pictorial symbols could add emotional or practical context to short messages. The original symbols were designed for a 12-by-12-pixel grid, making them compact enough for the mobile devices and displays of the period. They included familiar subjects such as weather, food, transport, and facial expressions.

Emoji did not begin as a worldwide Unicode feature. They first developed within Japanese carrier ecosystems, and competing services used different character mappings and artwork. That incompatibility helped create confusion when users exchanged messages across networks. Later efforts to encode emoji in Unicode made the symbols more portable between systems.

DoCoMo’s 1999 launch is commonly treated as a landmark in emoji history, although pictorial characters and emoticons existed in other forms before it. The original set is therefore an important starting point for modern emoji, not the invention of every earlier visual communication symbol.