WEBVTT 00:00:33.840 --> 00:00:42.000 Imagine it's nineteen ninety-five, and you're sixteen in a bedroom outside Tokyo. 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:44.880 It's very late. 00:00:44.880 --> 00:00:52.799 The house is quiet, but you're awake, sprawled on your bed staring at your pager. 00:00:52.799 --> 00:01:03.840 It's a little gray plastic thing, small enough to close your fingers around, with a narrow screen to display a line of numbers. 00:01:03.840 --> 00:01:06.560 Everyone at school has one. 00:01:06.560 --> 00:01:11.200 At lunch break, there's a line at the payphone by the gym. 00:01:11.200 --> 00:01:17.280 Kids waiting their turn to press the keypad to send messages across the city. 00:01:17.280 --> 00:01:20.159 The one in your hand buzzes. 00:01:20.159 --> 00:01:28.879 O. Ya. Su. Mi. 00:01:29.760 --> 00:01:33.599 It means good night. 00:01:33.599 --> 00:01:38.319 But after the numbers there's something else. 00:01:38.319 --> 00:01:41.040 A small pixelated shape. 00:01:41.040 --> 00:01:42.879 A heart. 00:01:42.879 --> 00:01:47.040 Now, a pager only listens. 00:01:47.040 --> 00:01:56.719 You'd need a phone to send anything back, and the phone is in the hallway, and it's after midnight, and you don't want to wake your parents. 00:01:56.719 --> 00:02:04.480 So you lie there with the pager in your hand and watch as the tiny screen goes dark. 00:02:04.480 --> 00:02:08.639 You press the button again and it lights up. 00:02:08.639 --> 00:02:11.520 0833. 00:02:11.520 --> 00:02:13.280 A heart. 00:02:13.280 --> 00:02:15.840 The screen goes dark. 00:02:15.840 --> 00:02:19.039 You press it again. 00:02:19.039 --> 00:02:22.560 Good night, with a heart. 00:02:22.560 --> 00:02:29.120 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine. 00:02:29.120 --> 00:02:37.120 In Japan, the pager was known as a pocket bell. 00:02:37.120 --> 00:02:40.159 A doorbell you could carry. 00:02:40.159 --> 00:02:44.960 Someone dialed your number and it rang wherever you happened to be. 00:02:44.960 --> 00:02:48.479 A doctor could be called away from dinner. 00:02:48.479 --> 00:02:52.879 A salesman could find out that the office needed him. 00:02:52.879 --> 00:02:54.719 It was useful. 00:02:54.719 --> 00:03:03.599 The early devices only summoned you, but later they added a display so the caller could leave a phone number for you to call back. 00:03:03.599 --> 00:03:08.560 You'd find a phone, dial the number, and ask what they wanted. 00:03:08.560 --> 00:03:13.360 But the display didn't know whether or not the numbers were a telephone number. 00:03:13.360 --> 00:03:17.039 It would show whatever numbers the caller entered. 00:03:17.039 --> 00:03:21.599 And Japanese offers quite a few ways to read a number. 00:03:21.599 --> 00:03:30.639 Like eight could supply the sound ha from hachi or ya from yatsu. 00:03:30.639 --> 00:03:40.240 By borrowing sounds, shortening them, and allowing a little latitude, you could make a string of digits sound something like a word. 00:03:40.240 --> 00:03:43.280 You could make them mean something. 00:03:43.280 --> 00:03:49.439 The number 4649 meant "please". 00:03:49.439 --> 00:04:14.319 3341 was "Lonely". 39 means "Thank you." 14106 is "I love you." This kind of number wordplay is called goroawase and there's nothing from the manufacturer to tell you how this works. 00:04:14.319 --> 00:04:18.000 This wasn't the device's intended purpose. 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:21.360 But you could have a whole conversation this way. 00:04:21.360 --> 00:04:26.000 People even had what they called bell friends. 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:32.319 They knew one another by page or number and sometimes without knowing a name or even meeting in person. 00:04:32.319 --> 00:04:40.480 You could recognize someone by the messages they sent, by the way a conversation picked up again. 00:04:40.480 --> 00:04:47.759 The numbers you sent through a payphone could reach a person you wouldn't recognize if they were waiting just behind you. 00:04:47.759 --> 00:04:54.879 Pocket bells got so popular that some high schools banned students from bringing them to school. 00:04:54.879 --> 00:05:07.439 Then, in 1995, the company NTT Docomo released a pocket belt that could send a small picture of a heart along with the numbers. 00:05:07.439 --> 00:05:10.879 Pagers with the hearts were a hit. 00:05:10.879 --> 00:05:16.879 The next year, pager contracts in Japan peaked at over 10 million. 00:05:16.879 --> 00:05:22.800 Then Docomo made a new, more advanced pocket bell. 00:05:22.800 --> 00:05:28.879 It was intended to be a business device for people who needed to call the office. 00:05:28.879 --> 00:05:31.040 And it could display kanji. 00:05:31.040 --> 00:05:34.720 It could display the Latin alphabet. 00:05:34.720 --> 00:05:38.160 But the heart was gone. 00:05:38.160 --> 00:05:44.079 So young users started leaving Docomo for competing services that still had it. 00:05:44.079 --> 00:05:48.959 A man named Shigetaka Kurita worked at Docomo. 00:05:48.959 --> 00:05:57.680 He had sold pagers and he remembered watching school girls switch to other services when they couldn't send the heart anymore. 00:05:57.680 --> 00:06:05.199 Years afterward, he was still describing his surprise at how much difference that one symbol had made. 00:06:05.199 --> 00:06:08.800 But Kurita didn't stick to pager sales. 00:06:08.800 --> 00:06:24.480 By the late 1990s, he was in his mid-20s and working for Docomo, helping develop something called i-mode, a service that would allow people to check information on the little screen and send a message without having to find a phone first. 00:06:24.480 --> 00:06:30.399 With i-mode, there would be more room for words, but not much more room. 00:06:30.399 --> 00:06:35.439 An i-mode email could only hold 250 Japanese characters. 00:06:35.439 --> 00:06:40.160 So Kurita proposed including things like the heart. 00:06:40.160 --> 00:06:46.399 He had already seen what happened when one was taken away and reasoned that more could be useful. 00:06:46.399 --> 00:06:56.879 And despite Kurita having no training in graphic design, Docomo agreed, and they gave him five weeks to design the images. 00:06:56.879 --> 00:07:05.360 In five weeks, he needed to work out which images would improve communication. 00:07:05.360 --> 00:07:13.519 What places, concepts, emotions, and things could prevent arguments. 00:07:13.519 --> 00:07:17.120 Which ones could help people understand each other. 00:07:17.120 --> 00:07:22.240 And he had to figure out how to draw them in a tiny space. 00:07:22.240 --> 00:07:28.079 Each one could be just twelve pixels high and twelve pixels across. 00:07:28.079 --> 00:07:31.680 Curves had to become small staircases. 00:07:31.680 --> 00:07:34.399 Circles had corners. 00:07:34.399 --> 00:07:40.560 And there was a problem with the number 12 that Kurita would remember long afterwards. 00:07:40.560 --> 00:07:43.600 There was no middle square. 00:07:43.600 --> 00:07:49.199 Count six columns from the left and six from the right, and you meet at a seam. 00:07:49.199 --> 00:08:00.959 If you wanted a one-pixel wide line to run down the center of your image, like you would if you were drawing a heart, there is nowhere to put it. 00:08:00.959 --> 00:08:03.680 You had to shift the whole design over. 00:08:03.680 --> 00:08:10.399 And he needed people to recognize these things at a glance on a screen you could cover with your thumb. 00:08:10.399 --> 00:08:14.639 So he drew pictures people already knew. 00:08:14.639 --> 00:08:17.279 The symbols on public signs. 00:08:17.279 --> 00:08:21.439 The sun and clouds from weather forecasts. 00:08:21.439 --> 00:08:28.560 He pulled from Manpu the shorthand of manga, where a drop of sweat could tell you someone was nervous. 00:08:28.560 --> 00:08:42.960 He added an umbrella, a train, phases of the moon, a high-heeled shoe, a sailboat, a film projector. 00:08:42.960 --> 00:08:47.360 People would later mistake the projector for a pufferfish. 00:08:47.360 --> 00:08:53.120 He added an M to mean metro, but some people used it to mean McDonald's. 00:08:53.120 --> 00:08:58.799 Kurita assembled 176 images. 00:08:58.799 --> 00:09:06.240 He thought they would be given to designers to refine them, but they went out into the world as is. 00:09:06.240 --> 00:09:09.360 They were called emoji. 00:09:09.360 --> 00:09:14.960 E means picture, and emoji means character. 00:09:14.960 --> 00:09:20.159 Kurita's emojis were early, but others soon followed. 00:09:20.159 --> 00:09:25.360 Different companies developed their own, but there was a problem. 00:09:25.360 --> 00:09:29.360 The machines didn't all speak the same language. 00:09:29.360 --> 00:09:34.000 When you send a letter A, you aren't really sending the shape of an A. 00:09:34.000 --> 00:09:36.080 You are sending a code. 00:09:36.080 --> 00:09:40.559 The receiving machine sees that code and knows this is an A. 00:09:40.559 --> 00:09:45.279 It can draw the A in whatever font it uses, but it's still an A. 00:09:45.279 --> 00:09:52.320 Emoji could work the same way, except different companies had created different codes. 00:09:52.320 --> 00:09:58.639 One phone might know which code meant airplane, and another might have no airplane at all. 00:09:58.639 --> 00:10:03.600 So instead of an airplane, you might receive a blank square or nothing. 00:10:03.600 --> 00:10:09.519 This was exactly the kind of problem Unicode was built to solve. 00:10:09.519 --> 00:10:17.519 The Unicode Consortium assigns characters shared codes so that different machines can agree on what they're looking at. 00:10:17.519 --> 00:10:25.039 There was an early proposal to encode Docomo's emoji in Unicode in 2000, but it went nowhere. 00:10:25.039 --> 00:10:33.200 Then around 2007, engineers at Google began pushing for a standardized solution. 00:10:33.200 --> 00:10:35.919 Apple soon joined the effort. 00:10:35.919 --> 00:10:43.039 Their products were arriving in Japan, and users already expected to be able to communicate with these little pictures. 00:10:43.039 --> 00:10:50.799 So in 2010, Unicode 6 encoded hundreds of the symbols used as emoji. 00:10:50.799 --> 00:10:55.279 But the heart didn't need a new code. 00:10:55.279 --> 00:10:57.440 It was already there. 00:10:57.440 --> 00:11:02.480 The heart's Unicode assignment is U+ 2764. 00:11:04.399 --> 00:11:14.320 It entered Unicode years earlier among the dingbats, a collection of decorative black typography symbols. 00:11:14.320 --> 00:11:17.600 And Unicode names don't change. 00:11:17.600 --> 00:11:25.039 So the formal name for the red heart at the end of your late night message is HEAVY BLACK HEART. 00:11:25.039 --> 00:11:36.960 In 2016, Kurita's 176 images entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 00:11:36.960 --> 00:11:40.399 He paid his own airfare to go see them. 00:11:40.399 --> 00:11:46.240 The museum exhibited the little designs in its lobby and credited him by name. 00:11:46.240 --> 00:11:56.399 Those tiny designs made to fit into a 12 by 12 pixel grid on a screen were now something you could go to an art museum to see. 00:11:56.399 --> 00:12:00.639 People look at them the way they look at paintings. 00:12:00.639 --> 00:12:05.039 And you can watch them look and wonder what they see. 00:12:05.039 --> 00:12:08.320 Because we make them mean something. 00:12:08.320 --> 00:12:14.639 When you send a skull emoji, are you one of the people who use it for Halloween? 00:12:14.639 --> 00:12:16.399 For danger? 00:12:16.399 --> 00:12:18.639 For goth aesthetics? 00:12:18.639 --> 00:12:21.120 Or are you laughing? 00:12:21.120 --> 00:12:23.919 Is it so funny that you're dying? 00:12:23.919 --> 00:12:29.039 Do you see the flame emoji and think the sender is angry? 00:12:29.039 --> 00:12:32.080 Or are they giving you a compliment? 00:12:32.080 --> 00:12:36.639 Has an emoji ever kept you up late? 00:12:36.639 --> 00:12:46.879 You fell asleep with the pager in your hand. 00:12:46.879 --> 00:12:51.600 By the time you get to school, there's already a line at the payphone. 00:12:51.600 --> 00:12:58.960 You stand in line, rocking a little, onto your toes and back as you wait. 00:12:58.960 --> 00:13:01.600 Then it's your turn. 00:13:01.600 --> 00:13:06.879 You type 0840. 00:13:06.879 --> 00:13:11.039 Your finger hovers for a moment. 00:13:11.039 --> 00:13:13.440 And then you hit 88. 00:13:13.440 --> 00:13:19.600 You hang up, and somewhere nearby a pocket bell wakes. 00:13:19.600 --> 00:13:24.720 0840 with a heart. 00:13:24.720 --> 00:13:28.320 Good morning with a heart. 00:13:28.320 --> 00:13:36.480 I'm Daina Bouquin and this is Found in the Machine. 00:13:36.480 --> 00:13:47.279 If you enjoy my stories, please consider leaving a rating or a review wherever you listen. 00:13:47.279 --> 00:13:52.159 They really help others find the show, and I read all of them. 00:13:52.159 --> 00:13:57.919 And if you're interested in getting more content from me, you can join the show's Patreon. 00:13:57.919 --> 00:14:06.480 Just go to foundinthemachine.com / support to find the link to the Patreon and other ways you can support the show. 00:14:06.480 --> 00:14:12.960 Patreon members get access to Found in the Margins, my mini bonus episode series. 00:14:12.960 --> 00:14:18.720 Recent episodes have covered things like CRT Sea Glass and Chip Graffiti. 00:14:18.720 --> 00:14:21.759 Thanks as always for listening. 00:14:21.759 --> 00:14:23.600 I'll see you next time.