Japanese “monthly amount” button

“Monthly amount”: the price next to it is what you pay each month.

The character in the square is 月, a kanji (a character of Chinese origin used in Japanese writing), read getsu or tsuki. On its own it means “month” or “moon”. In price lists it stands for 月額, getsugaku, the monthly charge: a Japanese mobile-plan ad says 月額980円, “980 yen a month”, and gyms, streaming services and apartment listings use the same word. The emoji is that label on a coloured square, a stamp you can drop next to a number instead of writing the word out.

It belongs to a set of squared-kanji emoji that work as shop and listing stamps: 🈚 (無, “free of charge”), 🈶 (有, “charge applies”), 🈹 (割, “discount”), 🉐 (得, “bargain”), 🈳 (空, “vacancy”) and 🈵 (満, “full”). All of them lived on Japanese mobile phones long before smartphones, where they saved space in tiny listings, and they were encoded as a group so messages between Japanese carriers kept their meaning. Outside Japan they arrived as a package nobody had asked for, which is why 🈷️ is rarely seen on most keyboards.

What does it mean when someone sends 🈷️?

Almost always a price note, or someone playing with the kanji.

From a Japanese sender, or copied from a Japanese website, it marks a monthly fee: 🈷️1,200円 means 1,200 yen a month. It says nothing about when you pay or whether the plan renews by itself; that comes from the surrounding text.

From anyone else it is usually a lookalike pick. People who recognise 月 use it for “month”, for the moon, or for Monday, because Japanese calendars shorten 月曜日 (Monday) to 月. A Japanese reader will understand the kanji but find the orange stamp odd, roughly like writing “per month” when you mean “moonlight”. If you want the moon, 🌙 or 🌕 say it; if you want Monday, write the word. The emoji carries no emotional tone at all.