Hot Springs Emoji

A round pool with three wavy lines of steam rising from it. Short glyph, long history. ♨️ isn't just decoration: in Japan it's a working road sign, and it has been one since 1884.

The symbol marks onsen (温泉, hot springs) on Japanese maps, on prefectural signage, on bathhouse banners, on ryokan brochures, and on the little tiled tubs at the entrance of a neighborhood sento. Japan has more than 27,000 registered hot spring sources and over 3,000 onsen resort towns, according to Ministry of the Environment data. Together those sources pump out around 2.6 million liters of thermal water every minute. The country sits on four shifting tectonic plates with 111 active volcanoes, which is why geothermally heated water bubbles up almost everywhere you dig.

Outside Japan, ♨️ gets pulled into anything involving heat or steam. Hot tubs, saunas, spas, Korean jjimjilbangs, Icelandic blue lagoons, ramen broth, a cup of tea someone is photographing from above, a meme about being "in hot water." The emoji reads as "steamy" long before it reads as "Japanese map symbol," and that ambiguity is the whole reason the Japanese government tried to redesign the original signage in 2016, got yelled at, and backed down. More on that below.

The emoji works in three distinct registers, and people slide between them without noticing.

The first is Japan travel and onsen content. Travel influencers geotag ♨️ with names like Kusatsu, Hakone, Beppu, Kurokawa, Gero, and Yufuin. The tourism Ministry uses the symbol on bilingual signage, and creators who post ryokan tours tend to stack ♨️🏯⛩️🗾 to signal a traditional Japan itinerary. On TikTok, explainer videos that reveal "this emoji is an actual Japanese road sign" regularly pull millions of views, because most non-Japanese users assumed it was a generic "hot" icon.

The second is spa, wellness, and self-care. ♨️🧖 is the canonical combo for a spa day, the sauna, a Sunday reset, a Korean bathhouse in Los Angeles, a jjimjilbang in Seoul, a hammam in Istanbul. The emoji dominates hashtags like #NaturalSpa, #SoakItIn, and #GeothermalGoodness, which show up on captions like "Less stress, more steam" and "soaking in serenity at the onsen" documented in Instagram caption roundups.

The third is anything hot. Steaming ramen bowls, fresh bread, fresh pizza, coffee photographed from above with visible condensation. ♨️🔥 shows up on takes a user wants framed as spicy. ♨️💻 shows up on laptop-throttling rants. Some younger users treat ♨️ as a casual stand-in for 🔥 when they want something less obvious, though this remains niche: it hasn't become generational slang the way 💀 or 🫠 have. As Emojiall notes, the emoji's biggest popularity spike happened in September 2021, aligning with post-lockdown Japan-travel daydreams on TikTok.

The ♨️ symbol is older than the personal computer, older than the telephone, and slightly older than photography being normal.

It first appeared in the provisional 1:20,000 topographic map schema of 1884 (Meiji 17), commissioned by the Army General Staff's Land Survey Department for its semi-official maps of the Osaka region surveyed between 1884 and 1890. The original specification: a small circle representing the bath, three vertical curves representing steam, printed 1.5 mm square in black, with the marker's exact point defined as the midpoint of the bottom edge. The tub has barely changed in 140 years. The steam lines have shifted slightly over three major stylistic periods since 1895, the first of which (1895 to 1917) featured gently curved steam.

Two competing origin stories still circulate. The first: Japanese surveyors adapted the pictogram from a 19th-century German map symbol, which is plausible because Meiji-era cartography borrowed heavily from Prussian military surveying. The second, more colorful story: it was designed by Aburaya Kumahachi, the Beppu hotelier who claimed to have drawn it based on his own palm print when he moved to Beppu in 1911. As Kanpai Japan documents, the symbol was already on government maps decades before Aburaya touched it, but he did more than anyone to turn it into a tourism brand, stamping it on signage, posters, and the catch phrase "the best mountain is Mt. Fuji, the best ocean is Setouchi, the best hot spring is Beppu." He placed markers with that slogan on top of Mt. Fuji itself. There is a bronze statue of him in front of Beppu Station.

Aburaya also opened Kamenoi Ryokan in 1911, invented Japan's first "Hell Tour" sightseeing bus with female bus guides (a radical move in 1920s Japan), and essentially invented the modern onsen resort economy. Beppu now has the most geothermal spring sources of any Japanese prefecture, 4,788 registered sources according to Statista and Ministry figures.

The symbol became Unicode U+2668 in June 1993, listed simply as HOT SPRINGS. That made it globally available on desktop fonts years before smartphones existed. When Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo launched the first commercial emoji set in 1999, the onsen mark was already legible. By the time Emoji 1.0 was ratified in 2015 and the emoji became universal, ♨️ had been working as a road sign in Japan for 131 years.

U+2668 HOT SPRINGS was added to Unicode 1.1 in June 1993, which makes it one of the oldest characters in the entire emoji set. It predates emoji as a concept: it was added as a cartographic symbol in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, based on the long-standing Japanese map sign. It became an official emoji in Emoji 1.0 (2015) under the "Other Places" subcategory. The character has a text and emoji presentation; most platforms render the emoji version by default when followed by the VS16 selector (FE0F).

1. 1884Onsen symbol first appears on the Japanese Army Land Survey Department's 1:20,000 topographic map schema for the Osaka region↗
2. 1911Aburaya Kumahachi opens Kamenoi Ryokan in Beppu and begins branding the city with the onsen mark on posters and signage↗
3. 1993U+2668 HOT SPRINGS added to Unicode 1.1. The symbol becomes globally available as a text character↗
4. 1999NTT DoCoMo's first mobile emoji set ships including the hot springs mark. Japan-only for the next 11 years↗
5. 2015♨️ officially added to Emoji 1.0 as a cross-platform emoji↗
6. 2016Japanese government proposes replacing the onsen symbol with a three-figure variant for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Public backlash kills the redesign↗
7. 2021♨️ hits its biggest popularity spike on social media, driven by post-lockdown Japan-travel content on TikTok↗
8. 2025Kusatsu Onsen named Japan's #1 hot spring for the third consecutive year in the Jalan national ranking↗

• •Japan has more than 27,000 registered hot spring sources, together discharging around 2.6 million liters of water every minute. It's the densest hot-spring country on Earth, driven by 111 active volcanoes on four shifting tectonic plates.
• •Dogo Onsen in Ehime is Japan's oldest documented bathhouse, mentioned in the 8th-century Kojiki and still operating. The current building (1894) inspired the bathhouse in Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away.
• •Beppu's "Hell Tour", invented by Aburaya Kumahachi in 1928, still uses geothermal vents to slow-cook eggs (onsen tamago) and steam vegetables. One of the "hells" is a blood-red iron-rich pool you can't bathe in but can cook food in.
• •Kusatsu's Yubatake pumps out sulfur water at pH 2.1, acidic enough to dissolve a 5-yen coin in a week. Bathers cool it by stirring with long wooden paddles (yumomi), accompanied by a traditional work song.
• •Jigokudani Monkey Park in Nagano is the only place in the world where wild Japanese macaques routinely bathe in hot springs. The tradition started in 1963 when one monkey followed a visitor into a ryokan pool, and the image has become one of the most-shared Japan-travel photos ever.
• •Japan legally regulates what can call itself an onsen. The 1948 Onsen Law requires water sourced from underground at 25°C or higher, OR containing at least one of 19 specified minerals. A regular hot tub isn't an onsen. A lukewarm mineral spring is.
• •Japan's inbound tourism pulled in JPY 8.1 trillion in 2024, about USD 53 billion. Onsen towns concentrated in rural prefectures are the backbone of that revenue and central to Japan's rural revitalization strategy.
• •One theory holds that Japanese surveyors borrowed the onsen symbol from a 19th-century German topographic map legend. Prussian cartography was the template for Meiji-era Japanese military surveying, so ♨️ may be a quiet souvenir of the 1870s Japan-Germany exchange.