Chopsticks Emoji

A pair of chopsticks, shown side by side rather than crossed. 🥢 stands in for East Asian cuisine: sushi, ramen, dim sum, bibimbap, bubble tea runs, noodle nights, anything where the utensil at the table isn't a fork.

Chopsticks go back about 5,000 years. The earliest known pair, six bronze sticks excavated from the Yin ruins in Henan Province, was used for cooking around 1400 BC, not eating. They only became dining utensils after the first century AD, when wheat spread and people started eating smaller, pre-cut bites. Confucius gets partial credit: he taught that weapons had no place at the table, so cutting happened in the kitchen, and gentle, blunt sticks took over the dining room.

As an emoji, 🥢 lives inside a much smaller story. It's part of Unicode's ongoing effort to stop treating "utensil" as synonymous with Western silverware. The proposal submitted by Jennifer 8. Lee, Namrata Mujumdar, Kenny Lao, Yiying Lu, and Emojination in January 2016 made exactly that argument: the keyboard had a fork and a knife but no chopsticks, despite chopsticks being used daily by more than a billion people.

🥢 is the caption punctuation for any dish that doesn't belong under 🍴. On Instagram and TikTok, it anchors food posts about sushi, ramen, pho, dumplings, Korean BBQ, bubble tea meetups, and weeknight takeout. Restaurants in the US lean on it heavily in Google Maps photos, Yelp listings, and Instagram bios, since it signals cuisine faster than the name sometimes does.

In group chats, 🥢 means "Asian food?" the way 🍕 means "pizza tonight?" Plug it after a restaurant name or neighborhood and you've suggested dinner. It also shows up in bicultural identity posts (heritage dishes, family kitchens, food-as-memory content), especially on TikTok's Asian food creator side.

One quirk: it spikes when a viral dish does. Every time a new sushi trend, ramen shop, or hot pot hack goes viral, 🥢 trails it in captions. It also rides alongside 🍱 (bento) and 🥡 (takeout box) in lunchbox content on Japanese school lunch TikTok.

The emoji itself exists because of a pointed campaign, not a slow cultural drift.

In January 2016, Jennifer 8. Lee and a team from Emojination (Namrata Mujumdar, Kenny Lao, and designer Yiying Lu) filed L2/16-023 with the Unicode Consortium. The argument was short: the emoji keyboard had a fork, a knife, a spoon, and a plate, but no chopsticks, despite being the primary utensil for hundreds of millions of daily users. Approval came in Unicode 10.0 in June 2017 and it shipped to Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft later that year.

The design story has its own twist. Lu's original sketch had the two sticks crossed. Bob Tung, a software engineer who watched a Unicode meeting photo circulate on Twitter, pointed out that crossed chopsticks carry strong funerary associations in Chinese tradition: crossed on a plate signals a death omen, and sticking a pair upright in rice mimics a Buddhist incense offering for the deceased. Lu, born in Shanghai, said she hadn't caught the reference. She un-crossed the sticks before the final submission. The Vice piece quotes her response: "Emoji are universal. It's fantastic that they opened up a conversation."

That redesign is why every modern 🥢 you see today shows two parallel sticks, tips aligned, never crossed. The taboo was baked out of the glyph before it ever shipped.

1. 2016Proposal L2/16-023 submitted to Unicode by Jennifer 8. Lee, Namrata Mujumdar, Kenny Lao, Yiying Lu, and Emojination↗
2. 2016Yiying Lu's original design showed crossed chopsticks. After Bob Tung flagged the funerary association on Twitter, Lu revised to parallel sticks↗
3. 2017Approved in Unicode 10.0 as U+1F962 CHOPSTICKS; added to Emoji 5.0↗
4. 2017Shipped across Apple iOS, Google Android, Samsung One UI, and Microsoft Windows

• •China produces an estimated 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year, with 80 billion pairs total worldwide. That consumes roughly 25 million trees annually, which is why China imposed a 5% disposable chopstick tax in 2006.
• •The earliest known chopsticks are six bronze sticks found in the Yin ruins near Anyang, dating to about 1400 BC. They were used for cooking, not eating. Chopsticks only became dining utensils after the first century AD as wheat spread and people started eating smaller pre-cut pieces.
• •Korean chopsticks are flat and metal because Joseon-era royalty used silver sticks to test for poison: silver reacts with arsenic and sulfur compounds. The design never changed back.
• •The Japanese word 'hashi' (箸) is the same sound as 'bridge' (橋), which is why placing chopsticks across a bowl like a bridge (watashi-bashi) is one of the soft taboos. It visually bridges 'eating' and 'done eating' when you haven't committed to either.
• •Japan has an entire chopsticks museum, the Hashi no Furusato-kan WAKASA in Fukui Prefecture, dedicated to waribashi production and chopstick history. Fukui makes about 80% of Japan's lacquered chopsticks.
• •Before 🥢 existed in Unicode 10.0, there was no chopsticks emoji on any keyboard anywhere. Developers working on Asian-food apps had to either use 🍴 (fork and knife) or the takeout box 🥡, or ship their own custom icons. The 2016 Emojination proposal explicitly called out this gap.
• •In modern Chinese etiquette guides, crossed chopsticks on a plate signal "I'm finished, but unhappy with the meal". It's the same diner-to-server silent language the West has with fork placement, just inverted.
• •The chopsticks emoji ranks 1st among the seven 'dishware' emojis (🍽️🍴🥄🔪🥢🥡🧂) on EmojiKitchen's frequency data, beating the fork and knife.

• 1. Bottom stick is a pencil rest: Lay the first chopstick on the side of your ring finger, butt end in the web between thumb and index. Thumb base locks it in place. It does not move.
• 2. Top stick is a pen: Hold the second stick between the pads of your index and middle fingers, stabilized by your thumb. This is the one that opens and closes.
• 3. Check the alignment: The two tips should meet perfectly when closed. If they cross or flare, slide your grip back toward the thick ends until they align.
• 4. Pinch, don't stab: Approach food from the sides, gentle pinch, lift straight up. Stabbing works with a fork, not here, and stabbing food is also slightly rude in Japanese dining (sashi-bashi).
• 5. Rest on the hashioki: Between bites, set chopsticks parallel on the chopstick rest or on the bowl rim. Do not stand them up, do not cross them, do not wave them around.

• •August 4 is Chopsticks Day (Hashi no Hi) in Japan, a play on the numerical reading 8-4 which sounds like 'hashi.' The Hashi no Furusato-kan WAKASA museum in Fukui Prefecture runs an annual festival with everything 50% off.
• •The Jennifer 8. Lee emoji campaign behind 🥢 also produced 🥟 (dumpling), 🥠 (fortune cookie), 🥡 (takeout box), 🧋 (bubble tea), and others. Emojination's mission is to push Unicode past a keyboard that was heavily Western and Japanese-corporate in its early days.
• •Disposable chopsticks (waribashi), those partially split wooden pairs handed out at Japanese and Japanese-American restaurants, were designed in 1878 and spread out of the Edo-era sushi vendor tradition, according to Japan Experience. The 'split them yourself' ritual is also proof they've never been used by anyone else.

• •🥢 is a single codepoint: U+1F962U+1F962. No variation selector needed. Shipped in Unicode 10.0 / Emoji 5.0 (June 2017), so anything older than iOS 11.1 or Android 8.0 won't render it and will show a tofu box instead.
• •If you're building a restaurant or food app, 🥢 is the correct emoji to signal Asian cuisine in a category picker. Pairing it with 🍴 for Western and 🌮 for Latin American creates a clean three-way utensil/cuisine taxonomy without defaulting to flags.
• •The Slack shortcode is :chopsticks::chopsticks:. The CLDR short name is 'chopsticks'. There's no skin-tone modifier support (it's an object, not a hand).

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.