Emoji have become a worldwide language for mobile phone messages. Emoji are everywhere -- displayed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and part of a new Hollywood film. They all started with one man, a 25-year-old named Shigetaka Kurita. He worked for the Japanese mobile phone carrier NTT DoCoMo. In 1998, he created the first set of 176 emoji pictures. “I happened to arrive at the idea. If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have,” Kurita said. He is now a board member at Dwango Company, a Tokyo technology company. NTT DoCoMo’s “i-mode” mobile Internet service limited messages to 250 characters. Users, therefore, would look for shorter ways to express their thoughts.