Japan Emoji & Symbols

🇯🇵 the Japanese flag comes first for anything about Japan: a trip, a match, pride, or simply where you live. Its colours work as ❤️🤍 or 🔴⚪, and 🌅 the sunrise stands for the country's own name: 日本, Nihon or Nippon, means the origin of the sun, which is why Japan is called the Land of the Rising Sun. 🗾 is the map of Japan, the main islands from Hokkaidō to Kyūshū, and one of the few emoji that is a whole country.

🗻 Mount Fuji, 3,776 m, the highest mountain in Japan and a World Heritage site since 2013, is the emoji people send for a view of the snow-capped cone from a train window or a climb in July and August. 🌸 the cherry blossom, sakura, is the flower of Japanese spring; when the trees bloom, around late March and early April in Tokyo, everyone goes out for hanami, flower viewing. Japan has no official national flower, and the chrysanthemum of the imperial seal has no emoji, so 🌸 does the job.

⛩️ is the torii, the gate of a Shinto shrine: the vermilion tunnels of thousands of torii at Fushimi Inari in Kyoto, or the great torii that stands in the sea at Itsukushima. 🏯 the Japanese castle looks like Himeji or Osaka Castle, with white walls and curved roofs, and 🗼 is Tokyo Tower, 333 m, red and white, opened in 1958 and inspired by the Eiffel Tower. Kyoto's temples, Tokyo's skyline and Osaka's food streets have no emoji of their own, so people combine these.

Japanese flag emoji: copy and paste 🇯🇵, and why Windows shows JP

The Japanese flag emoji is two regional indicator letters, 🇯 and 🇵, the country code JP, which phones and Macs draw as the white flag with the red disc. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC it shows as the letters JP; copy it anyway, because anyone reading on a phone sees the flag. On Discord type :flag_jp:. 🇯🇵 is one of the ten original flag emoji, taken from Japanese phone emoji into Unicode 6.0 in 2010.

The flag itself is the Hinomaru (日の丸, circle of the sun), officially Nisshōki. It was displayed on a Japanese ship by 1860 and was officially designated for commercial vessels in 1870; it became the national flag in law only in 1999. 🎌 crossed flags shows two Hinomaru flags on crossed poles, the way they are hung at gates on national holidays, so in Japan it means a celebration or a public holiday. For every other country flag see our Flag Emoji collection.

Japanese emoji: why so many emoji came from Japan

The word emoji is Japanese: 絵 e, picture, and 文字 moji, character. Japanese mobile carriers put tiny pictures on phones in the late 1990s, and the 176 emoji that Shigetaka Kurita drew for NTT Docomo's i-mode in 1999, each 12 by 12 pixels, are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When Apple and Google adopted emoji, Unicode took over the Japanese sets, which is why your phone has 🍙 🍢 🍥 🎑 🎐 🏣 and a whole row of kanji buttons.

Those buttons are Japanese shop and street signs: 🈚 無 free of charge, 🈶 有 not free, 🉐 得 bargain, 🈹 割 discount, 🈷️ 月 monthly, 🈂️ サ service charge, 🈺 営 open for business, 🈳 空 vacancy, 🈵 満 full, 🈯 指 reserved, 🈁 ココ here, 🉑 可 acceptable, 🈲 禁 prohibited, 🈸 申 application, 🈴 合 passing grade, ㊗️ 祝 congratulations and ㊙️ 秘 secret. These are the Japanese emojis on the iPhone's symbols page that puzzle people elsewhere.

Other emoji only make full sense the Japanese way. 🔰 is the wakaba mark that new drivers must display for their first year; online it means beginner. 💮 is hanamaru, the flower circle teachers draw on good homework. ⭕ and ❌ are maru and batsu, right and wrong (on a Japanese test a tick can mark a wrong answer), and 🙆 🙅 are the same ideas with arms held in a circle or crossed. 🙇 is a deep bow of apology or thanks, 🙏 means please or thank you (お願いします), and can also represent prayer, 💢 is the throbbing vein of anger from manga, 📛 the tulip-shaped name badge of kindergarten children and 〽️ the ioriten that marks where a singer's part begins.

Japan also gave the internet kaomoji, emoticons you read upright: (^_^) for a smile, (T_T) for tears, (´・ω・`) for a sulk, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, whose face is the katakana ツ, and (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, the table flip, from chabudai-gaeshi, flipping the low dining table in anger. For hundreds more see our Kaomoji Symbols and Cute & Kawaii Symbols collections.

Japanese holidays and seasons in emoji

New Year, Shōgatsu, is the biggest holiday: 🎍 the kadomatsu of pine and bamboo stands at doors, families watch the first sunrise 🌅, visit a shrine ⛩️ and send nengajō cards with the animal of the year; 2026 is the Year of the Horse 🐎 and 2027 the Year of the Sheep 🐑. The greeting is あけましておめでとうございます, akemashite omedetō gozaimasu, あけおめ in a text. A lucky first dream, hatsuyume, has Mount Fuji, a hawk and an eggplant in it: 🗻🦅🍆. At Setsubun, usually 3 February, people throw roasted soybeans 🫘 at someone wearing an oni mask 👹 and shout 鬼は外！福は内！ demons out, luck in.

🎎 the dolls are set out for Hinamatsuri, Girls' Day, on 3 March, and 🎏 carp streamers, koinobori, fly for Children's Day on 5 May, in the middle of Golden Week. On Valentine's Day women give chocolate 🍫 and on White Day, 14 March, the gifts go back the other way. 🎋 is the bamboo of Tanabata, 7 July, hung with paper wishes for the night the star lovers meet across the Milky Way.

Summer means festivals: 🏮 lanterns at Obon in August, when families welcome back the spirits of their ancestors, 👘 cotton yukata at fireworks displays 🎆, 🎐 the glass wind chime, fūrin, ringing on the porch, and 🍧 shaved ice. Autumn has 🎑 tsukimi, moon viewing with pampas grass and dango under the full moon 🌕, where Japanese see a rabbit 🐇 pounding rice cakes, and 🍁 momiji, the red maple leaves people travel to see. At Christmas many families eat fried chicken 🍗, a habit started by a 1974 KFC campaign, and a strawberry shortcake 🍰, which is exactly what the 🍰 emoji shows.

Japan food emoji, travel, sports and pop culture

Japan food emoji fill a whole row: 🍣 sushi, 🍙 onigiri wrapped in nori from every convenience store 🏪, 🍱 bento, including the ekiben sold for train journeys, 🍘 senbei rice crackers, 🍜 ramen with its 🍥 narutomaki swirl, 🍛 Japanese curry, 🍲 nabe hot pot, 🍢 oden, 🍤 fried prawns, 🐙 for Osaka's takoyaki, 🥟 gyōza, 🍠 yaki-imo sweet potatoes sold from trucks in winter, 🐡 fugu, handled under rules that vary by prefecture, and 🍡 three-colour dango. Drink 🍵 green tea or matcha and 🍶 sake, and eat with 🥢 hashi. Say いただきます, itadakimasu, before the meal and 乾杯, kanpai, to toast.

For travel, 🚅 is the shinkansen, the bullet train, which opened between Tokyo and Osaka in October 1964, just before the Tokyo Olympics. ♨️ is the Japanese map symbol for an onsen, a hot spring, where in Nagano the snow monkeys 🐒 bathe too. In Nara the deer 🦌 bow for crackers, foxes 🦊 are the messengers of Inari's shrines, and 🌋 fits a country with over a hundred active volcanoes. 🌊 on Apple devices looks much like Hokusai's woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. 🏣 is the Japanese post office, 🏩 the love hotel rented by the hour, both Japanese emoji from the start.

⚾ Baseball, yakyū, is the most followed sport: the national high-school tournament at Kōshien stops the country every summer, and Japan won three of the first five World Baseball Classics, in 2006, 2009 and 2023. ⚽ is for the national football team, Samurai Blue, 🥋 for judo and karate, both Japanese, and 🤼 stands in for sumo, which has no emoji. 🎮 stands for Nintendo, Sony and Sega, 👾 for Taito's Space Invaders of 1978, and 🎤 for karaoke, a Japanese invention whose name means empty orchestra. 🥷 the ninja, 👺 the long-nosed tengu, 🎴 the flower cards hanafuda and 🪭 the folding fan, sensu, complete the picture of old Japan.

Japan symbols: the yen sign ¥ and 円, kanji and Japanese punctuation

The yen symbol is ¥, the same sign the Chinese yuan uses; in Japanese the yen is written 円, read en, after the number (500円), , and on a standard Japanese keyboard the ¥ key types a backslash (U+005C) on Windows, often drawn as ¥. On Windows hold Alt and type 0165 on the number pad for ¥, on a Mac press Option + Y, and in HTML write ¥. Write JP¥ or JPY when it could be confused with yuan. 💴 is the yen banknote and 💹, a chart with ¥, comes from Japanese phones as the sign for the stock market.

The Japanese symbols people copy are mostly kanji: 日本 Nihon, Japan, 和 wa, harmony and also Japanese style (washoku, Japanese food), 愛 ai, love, 心 kokoro, heart and mind, 夢 yume, dream, 美 bi, beauty, 桜 sakura, 侍 samurai, 忍 shinobi, the first character of 忍者 ninja, 道 dō, the way (as in judō and bushidō), 禅 zen, 祭 matsuri, festival, and 寿 kotobuki, long life and celebration, also the first character of 寿司, sushi. Japanese is written with three scripts at once: hiragana for grammar and native words, katakana for foreign words (ラーメン, rāmen), and kanji, with 2,136 in everyday official use. Unicode also has square era names, ㋿ Reiwa (from 1 May 2019), ㍻ Heisei, ㍼ Shōwa, ㍽ Taishō and ㍾ Meiji, and ㈱ ㍿, the marks for a company, kabushiki gaisha.

Japanese punctuation is full-width: the hollow full stop 。, the comma 、, quotation brackets 「 」, with 『 』 for quotes inside quotes and titles of books, 【 】 for headings and labels, ・ between words of a foreign name, ー to lengthen a katakana vowel, 〜 for ranges and a drawn-out tone, and 々 to repeat a kanji (人々 hitobito, people). ※ kome-jirushi marks a note, 〆 means closed or deadline (〆切), 〒 the postal mark goes before a postcode (〒100-0001) and is said to come from the katakana テ of the old Ministry of Communications, and 〶 marks a post office on maps. In romaji, the Hepburn spelling marks long vowels with a macron: Tōkyō, Ōsaka, Kyūshū. On a Mac use the ABC – Extended keyboard and press Option + A then the vowel; on a phone long-press o or u; on a computer, Japanese input methods turn typed romaji such as sakura into さくら and, with Space, into 桜.

Japan has about 123 million people by CLDR's estimate, and about 117 million speak Japanese. Central Okinawan, the Ryukyuan language of Okinawa, is severely endangered, with about 95,000 native speakers by a 2011 estimate, and Korean about 640,000, all estimates. Each has a collection here: Japanese, Central Okinawan and Korean.