About Map Of Japan
Map Of Japan is the Unicode character 🗾 at codepoint U+1F5FE in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
A country shape among globes. U+1F5FE is formally named SILHOUETTE OF JAPAN, while CLDR's short name is map of Japan — one of 365 cases, out of the standard's 1,184 single-codepoint emoji carrying a Unicode name, where the two disagree. It sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. Unicode's test data files it under maps and places, a subgroup of just seven fully qualified entries: four globes, a world map, a compass, and this. Everything else in that group shows the whole planet or points at it; this is the only one that shows a single country. Its immediate neighbours in the block are a mountain, a tower, a statue and a stone figure.
Typical uses
- Japan itself, which is the whole of what CLDR's two keywords say
- Travel and place contexts about the country
- Not as a generic map — the world map is a different character in the same subgroup
At a glance
- U+1F5FE, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- Formal name SILHOUETTE OF JAPAN; CLDR short name map of Japan
- The only single country in a seven-member subgroup of maps and globes
- No HTML named entity. Write 🗾 or 🗾
Historical Notes
Origins
Why a single country got its own outline is not something the chart states. The encoding gives a strong hint without stating it, and the hint is in the neighbours.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. Its subgroup holds seven fully qualified entries and this is the only one that is not a globe, a world map or a compass.
What the block's last five addresses hold
Read the end of Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs in order and the pattern is hard to miss: U+1F5FB MOUNT FUJI, U+1F5FC TOKYO TOWER, U+1F5FD STATUE OF LIBERTY, this character, and U+1F5FF MOYAI — whose chart annotation reads that it is a Japanese stone statue like the moai on Easter Island. Four of those five are Japanese subjects, and the fifth is annotated by reference to a Japanese object. That run is the clearest thing in the property files about where the early emoji set came from, and it is a matter of record rather than inference.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Map Of Japan
To use the Map Of Japan symbol (🗾) in HTML, insert the
entity 🗾 directly into your markup. The decimal entity 🗾 works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\1F5FE';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F5FE}' evaluates to 🗾. In Python source, write '\U0001F5FE'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 97 BE as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DDFE as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128510.
This is a fully-qualified emoji and should render with colour on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Appearance may vary between platforms, but the underlying codepoint is identical everywhere.
Things to know
- Its formal name and its CLDR short name differ. Matching on one will not find the other.
- It always means Japan. For a generic map, the world map character in the same subgroup is the one.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83D DDFE in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
- Not Emoji_Modifier_Base and not a variation-sequence base.
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
- No named HTML entity. Write 🗾 or 🗾.
In the Wild
Two encyclopaedia articles about the country, one of them specifically about its geography, contain no occurrence of this character at all. Long, detailed writing about Japan, and not one use of the character encoded for its outline.
It appears twice in CLDR's annotation data and once as a chart cell, in each case being defined.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Why is the formal name different from the one everyone uses?
Unicode names are fixed at publication and never changed. CLDR's short names can track usage, so the two drift apart.
Is there an emoji for other countries?
Not as outlines. The flags are a separate mechanism built from regional indicator characters.
Is it a generic map?
No. The subgroup holds a world map and four globes for that; this one is specifically Japan.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 🗾 or 🗾.