Indeed. Kanji are quite similar in abstraction level to roman letters. That's why I don't agree with your assertion that emoji and kanji are basically the same.

Indeed. Kanji are quite similar in abstraction level to roman letters. That's why I don't agree with your assertion that emoji and kanji are basically the same. The two are very, very different in how they convey ideas. Emoji are concrete, directly showing the thing they represent while kanji are abstract and mostly unrecognizable (more similar to English words). A few typical examples would be 日 (sun), 人 (person) and 目(eye). No matter the font, the glyph for 人 will not imply details like gender. For emoji, extra care needs to be taken to strip out irrelevent details or you end up with problems like the 'pedestrian' emoji[1]. [1]: https://emojipedia.org/pedestrian/ https://emojipedia.org/pedestrian/