Japanese cellphone is the birthplace of emoji – emoticon as a single letter. Now they are usable outside of Japan on Gmail and iPhone. By Google’s and others effort, October 11, 2010, they were included in the international standard, Unicode version 6.0. So now those pictogram are supposed to be used for communication among anyone using Unicode capable computers.

However, on legacy system, i.e. Japanese cellphone, three carriers adopted emoji separately, left some incompatibilities. A Japanese blogger Nakamura001 verified a case which sometimes had been rumored, musical note emoticon gets unintended conversion to a poop character.

He tested if it really happens, and if so under what situation. The one combination he found was sending single note emoji from Docomo cellphone,

will be converted to poop on Gmail on iPhone,

As you see, the second letter, three notes on Docomo, was also changed into a flower letter. The third one, a musical note in regular letter (not a new emoji) stays the same.

Some emoji before Unicode standard is not compatible among carriers, and there are gateways by Softbank Mobile and/or Gmail to take care of converting them, it looks like a mapping bug.

Japanese use musical note letter a lot in casual mail, to show cheeriness emotion. Nakamura001 wrote there could be many bad conversion happened. For example,

“I love you(poop)”
“Thank you(poop)”
“You can do it(poop)”
“Yummy Curry(poop)”

Tags: Japan, Joke by Akky Akimoto
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According to the research [J] by Tokyo-based MMD Laboratory, 89.1% of mobile web users are reluctant to disclose their real name on the web.

88.2% does not like to upload their portrait, 90.8% for contact, 84.9% for company name, 69.8% for location information (by GPS).

They also asked if the user uses real name on Mixi, Twitter and Facebook. On Mixi, 16.5% use their real name. 7.0% on Twitter. On Facebook, though the quantity of responses was not enough, 51.3% users set real name. Facebook requires you to use the real name and caution that you can be banned without real name so it is not strange, but still half of Japanese are not using real name there.

Facebook Japan local manager Taro Kodama told that Facebook would keep the same real name policy in Japan.

The questionnaire was done with 2130 Japanese cellphone web users so it does not reflect how PC users feel.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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