Secret of the smile

Every day, when we chat to friends on What­sApp, we use dozens of emoti­cons to ex­press our­selves with­out words. The pic­tograms used by this ap­pli­ca­tion were bought last year by the so­cial net­work­ing giant Face­book, and are called emoji. They are orig­i­nally from Japan and were in use from the late '90s, long be­fore What­sApp came about. In Japan­ese “e” means image and “moji”, char­ac­ter. Be­cause they come from a cul­ture that is quite dif­fer­ent to our own, at times they have a very dif­fer­ent mean­ing from what we un­der­stand them to be. This can lead to er­rors of semi­otic in­ter­pre­ta­tion. Take for ex­am­ple the girl dressed in pink who has her hands on her head. For us, this might seem a sign of sur­prise or shock, but in Japan this ges­ture usu­ally means “I agree.” And the same girl when she is cross­ing her arms? Through­out Asia, this is the way of ex­press de­nial or re­fusal. There is also the mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure of a boy wear­ing a blue sweater who seems to be dou­bled over. In fact, this po­si­tion is called do­geza and in Japan and is used to dis­play a pro­found re­spect.

Emoji re­fer­ring to the hands are an­other source of con­fu­sion in cul­tural terms. Some rep­re­sent the most basic con­cepts of uni­ver­sal sign lan­guage, but there are many oth­ers that are es­sen­tially Japan­ese in na­ture, such as the ges­ture of join­ing hands to­gether. We could read this as a a sign of prayer or hope, that some­thing good will

hap­pen or plead­ing, when in fact in Japan it is used to rep­re­sent grat­i­tude. When we raise both hands with our palms show­ing the Japan­ese would be ex­press­ing great hap­pi­ness and at the same time shout­ing: “Ban­zai!”

The ref­er­ences to Japan­ese cul­ture do not end here, and there are many emoji re­lated to gas­tron­omy and tra­di­tional fes­ti­vals of the coun­try. In the food sec­tion, there are many Japan­ese dishes, such as sushi, oni­giri-rice balls, noo­dle bowls, do­rayaki cakes, soft ice-cream ... even the tra­di­tional bot­tles of sake.

With emoti­cons, you can also learn more about the typ­i­cal fes­ti­vals to be found in the Japan­ese cal­en­dar: the bam­boo shoots sur­rounded by pine branches are kado­matsu de­pict­ing the ra­di­tional New Year; two fly­ing carp-shaped bal­loons rep­re­sent koino­bori, the cel­e­bra­tion of a type of chil­dren's day, and there is a com­plex one of a smil­ing moon over a field of grain used to rep­re­sent tsukimi and the feast cel­e­brat­ing the au­tumn equinox. But just how did these Japan­ese emoti­cons came to be ac­cepted world­wide? The an­swer is that it is all thanks to Google. In 2007, when the search-en­gine giant made a big en­trance into the Japan­ese mar­ket, they de­cided to the use pop­u­lar ex­ist­ing phone graph­ics in Gmail. Back then, each phone com­pany had its own graph­ics and Google sim­ply uni­fied the sys­tem.

Many coun­tries pub­lish sta­tis­ti­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion based on their own cri­te­ria, in­de­pen­dent from oth­ers, with no re­la­tion­ship be­tween them. But in an in­ter­con­nected world like today, where the great ma­jor­ity of prob­lems are truly global, it is much more log­i­cal to pre­sent sta­tis­tics tak­ing into ac­count the ex­ter­nal ac­tion of states and mea­sure their im­pact on the rest of hu­man­ity.

This is the view, at least, of Simon An­holt [www.​simonanholt.​com], the au­thor of the so-called Good Coun­try Index [www.​goodcountry.​org/​overall]. It is an in­ter­na­tional rank­ing that has been built up over the last two years from 30 UN data-banks [un.​org] and other in­ter­na­tional agen­cies and is linked among other things to gross do­mes­tic prod­uct (GDP).

This index mea­sures the im­pact of each coun­try in the world in seven cat­e­gories: sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy, cul­ture, peace and global se­cu­rity, world order and world cli­mate, pros­per­ity and equal­ity, and health and well­be­ing. At the top of the list is Ire­land [www.​gov.​ie], given that it did not send troops to Afghanistan in 2010 (when the rank­ings were cal­cu­lated), and be­cause it also has a large in­ter­na­tional aid pro­gramme, low pop­u­la­tion growth and gen­er­ates al­most no refugees.

Ire­land is fol­lowed on this in­ter­est­ing list by Fin­land [val­tioneu­vosto.fi], Switzer­land [www.​admin.​ch], the Nether­lands [www.​government.​nl], New Zealand [www.​govt.​nz], Swe­den [www.​government .se] Great Britain [www.​gov.​uk] Nor­way [www.​regjeringen.​no], Den­mark [www.​denmark.​dk] Bel­gium [www.​belgium.​be] and France [www.​gou​vern​emen​t.​fr].