The invention in Japan, Europe, and the US of smileys was relatively concurrent, which makes sense because by the late 90s, text-art faces (e.g. ":-)" "(^_^)") were prevalent.
Emoji specifically (絵文字, where 絵 means "picture") are a Japanese invention. They were / are custom pictures, initially monochrome, which Japanese mobile phones allowed to insert into texts.
Yes, the first things called "emoji" (a Japanese word) appeared (unsurprisingly) in Japan.
Custom monochrome pictures that can be put inline with text date at least back to ATASCII and PETSCII on Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines respectively.
MSN Messenger had pictures that could also be put into text (they were called smileys, but included plenty of non-face pictures), this happened the same year as NTT DoCoMo launched emoji in i-mode; yes the J-Phone had them in 1997, but it wasn't super popular.
Web forums like UBB already had what we called "smilies" in 1998 with graphical emotive faces you could include in your posts, so that concept of image emotes predates the Japanese emoji.
Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.
But now services like Slack and Mastodon have what they call "custom emoji" which hijacks the term and takes us back to 1998 web forums again.
> Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.
That's not quite right. The Unicode emoji we use today are directly descendant from the emoji that were on Japanese phones.
That's how emoji ended up on our keyboard: Apple added them to the Japanese iPhone keyboard to be compatible with Japanese carriers; users in the west discovered this and started enabling Japanese input on their phones to use them; finally they became so popular that Apple (and Samsung etc.) also enabled them for non-Japanese keyboards.
If not for the original Japanese emoji, chances are that every website would still have their own smileys, instead of there being a single, interoperable set.
But now that "custom emoji" on sites like Slack and Mastodon are a thing, the term "emoji" is losing it's meaning and reverting to meaning the same thing we had before.
i strongly suspect that the reason we call them "emojis" rather than "smilies" is due to the "emo" in "emoji". 100% of english speakers without any japanese knowledge associate the "emo" in "emoji" with "emotion"
I know that, but it's not relevant to the point. The whole article is talking about smiles and emotions conveyed in text, so that's the context.
The name doesn't matter. Forum smilies also had a bunch of non-faces/emotions (my favorite was the "stink lizard" - still not sure what that was supposed to convey) but they're not interesting to the discussion.
Yeah, that table in the link contain 176 characters that begins with weather symbols, of which five are faces in second to last row - nine if I include snowman, googly eyes(Slack/GitHub "ack" icon), dog and cat faces. That's mere 3%(5%) of already small set, vs page after pages of trivially distinct human flesh in Apple Emoji.
