The Unicode Consortium added most of the commonly supported emoji (picture-characters: http://wap2.jp/emoji/imode/?act=list http://wap2.jp/emoji/imode/?act=list

The Unicode Consortium added most of the commonly supported emoji (picture-characters: http://wap2.jp/emoji/imode/?act=list http://wap2.jp/emoji/imode/?act=list) from Japanese cell phones to the list of glyphs Unicode supports. As a result, if something was socially important enough to make it into early generations of featurephones in Japan back in the day, it is now in Unicode. Cats/dogs made the cut, along with a bunch of characters which are a bit more esoteric by Western standards, such as a pictograph representing hot springs or the silhouette of Mt. Fuji. Many American programmers of my acquaintance believe U+1F4A9 (pile of poo) got grandfathered in at the same time, but they are historically mistaken. Japanese phones didn't have the pile of poo until much later.