You would be forgiven for wondering what, exactly, this emoji (♨️) is meant to represent. Well, if the title has not already given the game away, I will tell you: this is the HOT SPRINGS emoji,1 and in emoji terms at least, it is positively antediluvian. Not only that, but ‘♨️’ gives us a peek behind the Unicode curtain — Unicode being the consortium, and the eponymous standard, which define how computing devices encode text.
The emoji that Unicode first added to their computerised character set in 2010 came from a variety of sources. Chief among them were Japan’s big three mobile phone networks: NTT, KDDI and Softbank.2 But pipping emoji into Unicode was a different collection of Japanese symbols. ARIB, the industry body for Japan’s TV and radio networks,3 had its own lexicon of symbols for TV news programmes, weather reports and more, and among those symbols was this one, ‘♨︎’, standing for the onsen, or hot springs, on which Japan’s traditional bath houses were built.4
Unicode is not a democracy, exactly, but the consortium accepts suggestions from other organisations and even members of the public on which characters should be added to its set. In 2007, then, a Michel Suignard had proposed to add ARIB’s symbols, including ‘♨’, to better support Japanese users.5 But Unicode already had an onsen symbol. In fact, it had had one since Unicode version 1.0, published way back in October 1991.6
Now, it’s not entirely clear to me why this should be the case. Unicode 1.0 was Frankensteined together from a number of earlier character sets, including two from Japan, but neither one of them contained an onsen character.7,8 ‘♨︎’ was a common cartographic symbol at the time,9 which may have been enough for Unicode to give it the nod, but that is pure supposition on my part. Not every character’s journey into the Unicode standard is documented, and the onsen symbol is every bit as mysterious as the interrobang (‽) in this respect.
So, to recapitulate: in 1991, for reasons unknown, a certain Japanese cartographic symbol (♨︎) made the cut for the initial version of Unicode standard. Its utility was reaffirmed in 2007 by its presence in a collection of Japanese broadcasting symbols also to be added to the standard.
Then, in 2010, came emoji. And it turned out that not only was ‘♨’ used on maps and on TV, but also that all three of Japan’s big cellphone carriers had a HOT SPRINGS emoji in their respective sets.2 End of story, right? Our onsen symbol has reached its final form.
Well, not quite. When Unicode added a host of emoji in 2010 it was obvious that they would have to be drawn in colour — but what of those, such as ‘♨︎’ which already existed as black-and-white symbols? We’re accustomed, these days, to emoji’s colourful appearance, but in the late 2000s, when emoji were still taking tentative steps out of Japan and into the rest of the world, text was very much a monochrome prospect. The Unicode Consortium didn’t quite know how to handle the problem, writing that:
Because many characters in the core emoji sets [overlap] with Unicode characters that originally came from other sources, there is no way […] to tell whether a character should be presented using an “emoji” style; that decision depends on context.10
You’re on your own, in other words. For a handful of years, these problematic characters were left up to those companies and organisations which translated Unicode’s abstract numeric “code points”* into concrete glyphs — the Googles, Apples, and Facebooks of the world, not to mention sundry type designers. In the confusion, some symbols were rendered as colourful emoji and others as sober monochrome icons.11
Finally, late in 2011, the consortium made some behind-the-scenes technical adjustments to allow certain characters to be rendered either in black and white or in colour;12 ‘♨︎’ and ‘♨️’ were given their own distinct appearances, and the onsen emoji was born.
I hope this has given you some insight into how emoji made their way onto our smartphones and computers, and how fraught their journey has been — and yet it’s worth noting that even tracing the evolution of the ‘♨️’ in some detail barely scratches the surface of that process. Whenever you type a ‘❤️’ or a ‘😭’, spare a thought for the programmers, language experts, and type designers who made it possible.
- 1.
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Emojipedia. “♨️ Hot Springs Emoji”. Accessed October 31, 2025.
- 2.
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Scherer, Markus, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, Darick Tong, Yasuo Kida, and Peter Edberg. “L2/10-132:/Emoji/Symbols:/Background/Data”. Unicode Consortium, April 2010.
- 3.
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“Association of Radio Industries and Businesses”. Accessed October 31, 2025.
- 4.
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McGee, Oona. “Gov’t Reveals New Hot Spring Symbol for Foreign Tourists Ahead of Tokyo Olympics - Japan Today”. Japan Today.
- 5.
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Suignard, Michel. “L2/08-077R2:/Japanese/TV/Symbols”. Unicode Consortium, March 11, 2008.
- 6.
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“Code Charts”. In The Unicode Standard, Version 1.0. The Unicode Consortium, 1991.
- 7.
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CyberLibrarian. “JIS X 0208コード表”. Accessed November 10, 2025.
- 8.
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CyberLibrarian. “JIS X 0212コード表(全コード)”. Accessed November 10, 2025.
- 9.
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ゼンリンオンラインショップ. “地図から散歩”. Accessed November 10, 2025.
- 10.
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“Symbols”. In The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0.
- 11.
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Davis, Mark. “L2/13-207:/Which/Characters/Should/Have/Emoji-Style/by/Default?”. Unicode Consortium, October 30, 2013.
- 12.
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“Standardized Variants”. Unicode.org.
- *
- For instance, ‘♨︎’ is represented by the hexadecimal number 0x2668. ↢