Asiajin

You might have heard about that Gmail and iPhone has added Japan originated emoticon, Emoji, set. You may know that Google has been promoting those “letters” into Unicode standard.

Filing those drawings as new letters is, though Chinese letters were made from drawings thousands years ago, not acceptable for all people, some says it is useless in other areas, culturally biased, too childish, violation against Unicode compatibility policy, etc.

But it is true that those Emoji-s are widely used on Japanese cellphones already, and Japanese population and market are not ignorable for those world-class internet companies including Google, Apple and others, it is understandable Google and companies need a standard way of handling those Emoji-s.

3 major Japanese cellphone carriers leaves incompatibility of those Emoji-s deliberately for their customer retention, which Google and others also try to solve by this standardization. This is so good for Japanese web developers because converting Emoji-s among carriers is one of the most hated tasks they have to do here.

Google successfully got agreement at Unicode Consortium after a great struggle, and now they are proceeding to the next level, ISO Working Group (WG2).

On the WG2, Ireland and Germany national bodies suggested an alternative, to make it more universal. They proposed more “universal” emoticons set. (citations to the original set)

On it, they also modified Emoji-s’ glyphs to what they thought more common. However, Japanese researchers think that some of emoticons’ expressions came from Japanese manga expressions, from which most Japanese can easily understand what emotions they conveys, but hard to guess if you are not familiar manga.

If you are interested in what argument around Emoji, Manga and Japanese culture are happening in Tokyo this week, please take a look at Katsuhiro Ogata’s proposal [English and Japanese, side by side].

See Also:

A Proposal to Revise a Part of Emoticons in PDAM 8 [pdf]

絵文字が開いてしまった「パンドラの箱」第5回–絵文字と日本マンガの親密な関係:コラム – CNET Japan“>Emoji opened Pandra’s box – relation between Emoji-s and Japanese Mangas – CNET Japan [J]

Mojino Namae – Katsuhiro Ogata’s blog [J]

Tags: Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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Official Google Blog (Japanese) announced [J] that their gmail on PC now became capable to send Emoji, emoticon-like letters supported by Japanese cellphones. (receiving emoji-mail from cellphone has been supported already.)

Even in English mode of gmail, your “Rich formatting” mode has a new set of emoji selector.

I sent a mail with emoji-s from my gmail to cellphone. Most emoji are shown properly, though few letters are not. Maybe because emoji sets have few incompatibility among 3 carriers (NTT Docomo, KDDI au and Softbank Mobile).

When the recipient have Japanese cellphone, Google server converts them into emoji character codes. On regular mail client including gmail, the mail with emoji seems to be sent as a HTML mail with images.

It is explained that this new feature was lead by Google Tokyo team but worked globally.

[Update] The official English Gmail Blog followed to announce. Interestingly, there are no mention that the idea was from Google Japan (as Google Japan team claimed [J]), nor it was for Japanese mobile users. So it is explained “to help you communicate” for the rest of non-emoji world.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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iPhone 3G provided by Softbank on coming 11th July will be the first iPhone in Japan. Since Jobs’ announcement, there are bunch of Japanese medias and blogs have been discussing if iPhone 3G is worth buying.

To clarify how iPhone and the latest Japanese cellphones spec are different, Asiajin called for comments on what functionalities they have/want/use, to potential Japanese iPhone buyers on Comparison Chart site Narabe. Here is the result,

This was originally asked in Japanese on Japanese version Narabete. Then, I copied the result of votes to the English version.

I initially set “All” and “Some” but “All” can have rare exceptional case, for example special model phones for kids or eldery. Most of “Yes”/”No” look correct but as it is “by polling” so some could be inaccurate.

If you have any features you cannot understand what they mean, please ask by comment.

[Disclosure] Narabe is run by Akky AKIMOTO.

[Update 2008.09.17] Thanks for digging this up. There are no “iTunes” and “Safari” on Japanese cellular phones, but of course those counterparts exist so with all cariiers you can enjoy music/movie download purchase and PC viewable browsers (“Full Browser”).

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan by Akky Akimoto
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If l33t is an English phenomenon mainly among Geeks, “Gal-Moji” (“Moji” = letters) is the counterpart for Japanese cellphone users, especially teenaged girls.

As with leetspeak, Gal-Moji users replace a standard Japanese character with a different but similar-looking character. This is made more chaotic, however, by the fact that the Japanese language has 3 different character sets (Hiragana, Katakana and Chinese-origin Kanji), along with the Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals, the total number of which is well over 3,000 characters. Characters not used in Japanese writing such as letters from the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets are even used.

Here is a sample from the Gal-Moji “dictionary” from Wikipedia. The Hiragana on the left (original Japanese characters) can be replaced with other similarly-shaped letters.

Similar shapes? For me, it is really hard to guess the target letter by looking at the letters on the right.

Kanji are morphed like this:

Gal-Moji was a social phenomenon in around 2002, when the mass-media portrayed it as a weird fashion of the younger generation. They are used less frequently than before, mainly because most cellphones now have their own original pictogram characters (e-moji, emoji) allowing people to express their emotions more easily. But you can still happen upon Gal-Moji in many places on the web, especially on mobile websites for young people.

In popular lore, the use of these secret languages was to show unity, to strengthen the concept of belonging to a group of friends, and to hide one’s communication from adults.

See also:

Gal-Moji Wikipedia [J]

Gal-Moji Converter [J]

“www” has another meaning in Japanese Web

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
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