Yes, the first things called "emoji" (a Japanese word) appeared (unsurprisingly) in Japan. Custom monochrome pictures that can be put inline with text date at

Yes, the first things called "emoji" (a Japanese word) appeared (unsurprisingly) in Japan. Custom monochrome pictures that can be put inline with text date at least back to ATASCII and PETSCII on Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines respectively. MSN Messenger had pictures that could also be put into text (they were called smileys, but included plenty of non-face pictures), this happened the same year as NTT DoCoMo launched emoji in i-mode; yes the J-Phone had them in 1997, but it wasn't super popular.