Chinese characters have long fascinated me. That fascination isn’t unique to me, I know — Westerners have been drawn to them for centuries, sometimes with questionable results. Think of the tattoos inked across arms and backs that, to anyone who can actually read them, range from nonsensical to downright embarrassing. Strength often turns out to say “noodle soup”. Love might really be saying “cheap”. Winner might actually be rendered as “Stupid foreigner”. Still, their visual pull is undeniable. Even when they’re wrong, they look right enough to impress someone at a bar.
What interests me most, though, isn’t the aesthetic but the history. For centuries, Chinese characters functioned as a kind of universal written language across East Asia. Japan, Korea, and Vietnam each pronounced words differently, but the characters themselves carried shared meaning. A merchant traveling across the region might be unable to follow the chatter in a marketplace, but if he saw the character for “rice” written down, he knew exactly what was being sold. It was a remarkable bridge: one symbol, many voices. If you’ve ever struggled to order food in a foreign country, you can appreciate how miraculous that must have felt.
It’s easy to forget how unusual this was. Europe never had anything like it. Latin spread widely, yes, but you still had to learn Latin. No shortcuts. Chinese characters worked differently. They were like a plug adapter: whatever your language’s shape, they fit. Japanese layered kanji onto their own syllabaries; Vietnamese combined them with chữ Nôm; Koreans used hanja. The spoken languages diverged, but the written ones held steady. For the literate, crossing borders didn’t mean starting from scratch.
Of course, all good things eventually end. Japan simplified characters one way, China simplified others another way, and Korea and Vietnam eventually abandoned them in favour of alphabets. The result? A traveller who once could decode menus and poems across the region would now be reduced to staring at squiggles wondering if that dish was beef or blowfish. Progress is rarely as tidy as historians pretend.
Fast forward to the modern world. In 1964, preparing for the Tokyo Olympics, Japanese designers faced a problem: millions of visitors, hundreds of languages, not nearly enough translators. Their solution was pictograms: simple images that spoke for themselves. A swimmer meant “pool”. A stick figure pedalling meant “cycling”. A person on skis meant “broken ankle waiting to happen”.
The idea worked so well that a decade later the American Institute of Graphic Arts adapted it for U.S. airports, and soon the icons went global. Wherever you land, a knife and fork means food, a plane silhouette means departures, and a bed means hotel. For the jet-lagged traveller who can’t remember how to say “toilet” in French, it’s a lifesaver.[1]
Which brings us to today. Emoji. Born in Japan in the late 1990s as a cute pager gimmick, they’ve become the closest thing we have to a universal script. A red heart works in Paris, Bangkok, or Nairobi. A crying face is instantly understood. Admittedly, nuances creep in (some cultures use 🙏 as “please” or even “thank you”, others as “pray”, and still others as “high-five”, which must make for some very confusing text exchanges) but the core idea holds. Tiny images cut through linguistic noise.
And unlike kanji or Olympic pictograms, emoji have personality. They’re playful, ironic, sometimes absurd. They let us say “I’m fine” while attaching a face that clearly says “I’m not fine at all”. They carry tone in ways words often fail. It’s not inconceivable that they’ll someday slip into formal writing the way punctuation did — how soon before you come across an academic paper ending with 😂?
The urge to find a universal language never seems to die. From brush strokes on bamboo to glowing screens in our palms, we keep inventing new sets of symbols that everyone can share. We just change the medium. And, inevitably, someone gets them tattooed.
So yes, I wonder: how long until we see the first emoji sleeve tattoo? Probably it’s already out there. A row of 🍕🍔🍟 down one arm. A tasteful 💩 on the ankle. Some future archaeologist will dig up these remains and conclude our civilisation worshipped hamburgers and poop.
Hmm… and that wouldn’t be too far off.
Anyway, what do you think?
During WWII, my grandpa was in a French village and needed to use the toilet. He asked as best he could, but the result was ending up in a room with only a sink and no toilet. Luckily, men have a solution to this problem. ↩
| David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |
