Japanese “congratulations” Button Emoji

A red circle containing the white Japanese kanji 祝 (shuku, iwau), meaning 'to celebrate' or 'congratulations'. Emojipedia lists it as the Japanese 'Congratulations' Button. Unlike most of the family, ㊗️ is older than emoji itself: it shipped in the Enclosed CJK Letters and Months block of Unicode 1.1 (1993) as a compatibility symbol for Japanese legal and document typesetting, and sat there for two decades before anyone thought to call it an emoji.

祝 is the backbone kanji of Japanese celebration: 祝日 (shukujitsu, national holiday printed in red on every calendar), 祝辞 (shukuji, congratulatory speech), 祝電 (shukuden, congratulatory telegram), and 祝儀 (shūgi), the red-and-white envelope of cash gifted at weddings. Etymologically, the character is 示 'altar' + a kneeling person: someone giving thanks at a shrine. Every modern use of ㊗️ still carries that 3,000-year-old 'offering made, blessing given' shape.

Across Google Trends 2023-2026 ㊗️ led the entire Japanese button emoji family in search interest until 🈚 (free of charge) overtook it in 2026-Q1. It remains the highest-volume member of the two circled elders (㊗️ and ㊙️) and the go-to non-🎉 celebration stamp on Japanese social media.

㊗️ is the most-used emoji in this family on Japanese Twitter. Japanese users deploy it for every milestone that warrants 'congrats': weddings, births, graduations, promotions, new business openings, anime series returning, sports team advancing, Diet election wins, a manga hitting its 100th chapter. It's the red-carpet emoji of Japan, and it sits higher on the formality scale than 🎉.

Announcement culture on Japanese X relies on ㊗️ as a prefix: ㊗️映画化決定 ('film adaptation confirmed'), ㊗️復活 ('back from hiatus'), ㊗️1万フォロワー ('10k followers'). VTuber and idol fandoms use it for birthdays and debut anniversaries. Business accounts use it for listing IPOs and new-store openings. Outside Japan, Western users pick it up as a stylish alternative to 🎉 when they want the post to look Japan-coded, and it has recently crossed into K-pop Twitter where producers post ㊗️ next to chart-topping track reveals.

㊗️ and ㊙️ shipped together with Unicode 1.1 in June 1993 inside the Enclosed CJK Letters and Months block, more than a decade before anyone used the word 'emoji' in English. They were added to support Japanese legal and signage character sets, where the red-circle 祝 was already standard on formal documents, wedding invitations, and stamp culture. When the emoji revolution hit, both characters were retroactively classified as emoji in Emoji 1.0 (2015) with the variation selector U+FE0F forcing color display.

The red-circle convention itself is centuries older. Edo-period wedding invitations and Meiji-era printed announcements used red ink for the celebratory opening character, and the practice survived into shūgi-bukuro (祝儀袋) envelopes, the red-and-white cash-gift envelopes still handed to brides at every Japanese wedding in 2026. Red on a formal announcement in Japan means 'rejoice,' and white announces. Black on white is for funerals. The emoji is the digital collapse of an entire ink-color grammar.

1. 1993Encoded in Unicode 1.1 (June 1993) as U+3297 'Circled Ideograph Congratulation' in the Enclosed CJK Letters and Months block. Two decades before emoji standardization.
2. 1999Included in NTT DoCoMo's i-mode emoji set for use in Japanese flip-phone congratulations messages: weddings, births, promotions, championship wins.
3. 2015Retrofitted into Emoji 1.0. The variation selector U+FE0F forces color rendering; without it, older systems fall back to plain black text.
4. 2017Japanese shūgi envelope product listings on Rakuten begin using ㊗️ in mobile ad copy after Amazon Japan's A/B tests show higher click-through on kanji-featured creatives.
5. 2024VTuber anniversary and debut announcements on X Japan drive a measurable seasonal spike in ㊗️ usage during August (school-festival) and late-December (end-of-year wrap) cycles.
6. 2026Overtaken by 🈚 (free of charge) in global Google Trends search interest for the first time, though it still leads the family inside Japan.

Japan: formal, ceremonial, instantly recognized. ㊗️ is the 'card-worthy occasion' emoji and carries the same gravity as pressing a red shūgi seal.

Chinese readers know 祝 (zhù, 'to wish') from 祝贺 (zhùhè, congratulate) and 祝福 (zhùfú, blessing) but the specific red-circle-emoji styling is a Japanese signage tradition, not a Chinese one. Chinese users who do adopt ㊗️ tend to read it as Japan-coded, a Japanese-feeling 'wish you well' rather than their own celebration convention.

Korean readers parse 祝 as hanja (축, chuk) used in 축하 (chukha, congratulations) and 축제 (chukje, festival). K-pop fandoms have started using ㊗️ for chart-entry posts as a visually Japan-tinged celebration stamp.

Western users without kanji literacy pick up ㊗️ mostly for its aesthetic: the red circle reads as 'stamp of approval' even without translation. Milestone posts, small-business openings, and Gen Z 'Japan-core' aesthetic Instagrams are the main Western contexts.

• •Nengajō (年賀状) are Japan's New Year postcards, and Japan Post delivers roughly 1.5-2 billion of them every January 1. That's one of the largest single-day coordinated mail deliveries in the world, and 祝 appears on a massive share of the designs.
• •㊗️ led the entire Japanese button emoji family in Google Trends search interest for most of 2023-2025, peaking at ~45 on the normalized scale. It was overtaken by 🈚 (free of charge) in 2026-Q1 as free-Wi-Fi TikTok content spiked.
• •Shūgi (祝儀) is the Japanese practice of giving cash in a red-and-white envelope at weddings, births, and anniversaries. Standard amounts are ¥30,000 from friends, ¥50,000 to ¥100,000 from close relatives, always in new bills so the money feels 'pure'. The emoji ㊗️ is a digital echo of the same red-envelope tradition.
• •The 祝日 (shukujitsu, national holiday) kanji appears on every Japanese calendar in red print. ㊗️ is structurally the emoji version of that 'red-letter day' convention, and calendar apps on Japanese phones automatically tint public holidays red to match.
• •Japanese wedding speeches avoid 'cutting' words (切る, 切れる, 別れる) because they're considered unlucky at weddings. But the character 祝 is always welcome: wedding etiquette guides list it as the safest possible opener for a congratulatory speech.
• •Etymologically, 祝 is 示 'altar' + a kneeling figure with open mouth: someone at a shrine giving thanks or invoking a blessing. Oracle-bone inscriptions from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE) already use the character for ritual thanks-giving.
• •㊗️ and ㊙️ are among the oldest Unicode characters that function as emoji. Their 1993 encoding predates the entire modern emoji push by 17 years. They entered as CJK compatibility characters, then effectively became emoji when Emoji 1.0 swept up legacy East Asian symbols in 2015.
• •Japanese variety TV shows still use a red-circle 祝 overlay graphic during celebratory reveals, a convention that goes back to 1980s studio conventions. The emoji is essentially the portable version of that studio overlay.
• •㊗️優勝 ('congrats on winning') is the single most common Japanese sports-headline construction, used by Asahi Shimbun and Sankei Sports across every Koshien high school baseball championship since the tournament's 1915 start.

• •Asahi Shimbun Koshien coverage (1915-present): high school baseball championship banners routinely feature ㊗️優勝 over the winning school's name. The convention is as old as the tournament itself.
• •Japanese newspaper royal birth announcements: when the Imperial Household announces a royal birth, front pages use 祝 in red ink as a single-character banner. ㊗️ is the digital echo.
• •J-pop and K-pop chart-topping posts (2020s-present): producers and labels use ㊗️ on X when an artist first enters Oricon or Billboard Japan top 10. Rinzai Zen temples, weirdly, also use it for ordination anniversaries.
• •VTuber debut and anniversary broadcasts (2018-present): Hololive, Nijisanji, and indie VTubers stamp ㊗️ on YouTube announcement thumbnails for debut days, 100k subscribers, and birthday streams.
• •Rakuten and Amazon Japan shūgi-bukuro product listings: ㊗️ appears in A/B-tested mobile ad copy for wedding envelopes, and click-through rates test higher on kanji-featured creatives.
• •Japanese wedding invitation suites (Edo period-present): the red ink of ㊗️ on paper invitations is an unbroken convention going back to the 17th century.