Japanese post office

A post office building wearing Japan's postal mark, 〒. In Japan that sign is everywhere mail is: on the front of every post office, on the red postboxes, on delivery vans, and in writing before a postal code (〒100-0001). If you have ever looked at a Japanese address and wondered about the little T with a bar over it, that is what the building in this emoji is wearing.

The post office behind the emoji is Japan Post, a nationwide network whose counters do more than stamps and parcels. The same building houses Japan Post Bank, so people go to the 🏣 to pay bills, make deposits, use the ATM and send packages. In villages and small towns the post office is often the one public counter that handles all of it, which is why the building earned its own emoji in the first place.

The emoji came from the picture sets on Japanese mobile phones, where a post office was an everyday landmark. When those sets were brought into Unicode in 2010, 🏤, a post office without the Japanese sign, was added alongside it so that other countries had a version of their own. That is why your keyboard has two.

What does it mean when someone sends 🏣?

Almost always a postal errand, not a feeling. "Off to the 🏣" means the sender is posting something, queueing for a parcel or picking up a delivery. Travellers in Japan use it for sending postcards home, buying stamps or withdrawing cash at the post office ATM. It carries no slang, no hidden meaning and nothing rude.

Outside Japan plenty of people send 🏣 for their own local post office. It comes first in the emoji keyboard, and in apps that use shortcodes it is the one behind :post_office:, so it ends up standing for any post office. Nobody will misunderstand you, and a reader who knows the 〒 sign will simply assume you did not notice 🏤 next to it.