This development and the aftermath of its use, led Kurita to design a set of 176 colored emojis. Many of the general-use emojis used today by Unicode can be traced back to Kurita's set. He now works for Dwango Co. Ltd., a Japanese games company owned by Kadokawa Dwango Corporation. The NTT DoCoMo emoji set he created is now on display in Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.
While emojis existed prior to the 1990s, they were often defined as pictograms in Asia. The term emoji is of Japanese origin, with the term only adopted in the west from 2010 onwards. Japan itself also struggled to define the emoji for a number of years. It wasn't until telecom companies began experimenting with the use of graphic images or pictograms in messaging facilities that the emoji concept became a working idea.
One of the first telecoms companies that trialed the concept of using pictograms in messaging facilities was NTT DoCoMo. In the 1990s, NTT DoCoMo released a pager that was aimed at teenagers. The pager was the first of its kind to include the option to send a pictogram as part of the text. The pager only had a single heart-shape pictogram as its option. This is thought to be Kurita's first exposure to the use of digital symbols in text form. The pager received rave reviews in Asia which led to other companies in the region to consider using pictograms in the list of text characters. NTT DoCoMo then released another pager aimed at businesspeople, but this time dropped the heart pictogram from the characters on the pager. Following its release, there was an outcry by users that the pictogram was no longer available and many customers switched to other providers that had now included a heart pictogram in their markup. This led NTT DoCoMo to reverse their decision and include the heart pictogram.

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