Name Badge Emoji

📛 is the Name Badge emoji, and no, it isn't a flame, a piece of burning tofu, or some kind of oddly specific warning sign. It's a tulip-shaped nafuda (名札), the cloth or plastic name tag that Japanese preschoolers pin to their smocks on the first day of school. The red part is a stylised tulip petal. The white rectangle in the middle is where the child's name goes. Every Japanese adult sees this and thinks '幼稚園' (kindergarten). Most English speakers see it and think 'why is a fire coming out of a receipt?'

📛 was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. It lives in the 'Office symbols' subblock of Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, right next to 📚 and 📜. The codepoint is U+1F4DB. It is one of the least-used emojis in the entire Unicode set, falling into Group 11+ of the official frequency table: less than 1/2048 the frequency of 😂.

The most famous thing about 📛 is probably that nobody outside Japan understands it. In July 2017, software blogger Jeff Atwood tweeted 'Can anyone explain why name badge emoji looks like a fireball? Is this a Japanese thing?' It was. It is. And that tweet has been doing rounds of viral cultural explainers ever since.

In English-language social media, 📛 is mostly used in three ways. First, to literally mean 'name badge,' usually paired with 👋 or 🪧 in a 'Hello my name is' caption for a conference, a networking event, or a new-job post. Second, as a joke emoji, leaning into the 'tofu on fire' misreading: people post 📛 next to tofu photos, next to spicy food, or next to anything that vaguely resembles a flame. Third, as a decorative Japan-adjacent emoji in bio lines and display names, usually alongside 🎐, 🍙, and 🔰 by people who want their profile to feel kawaii or J-pop coded.

On Japanese Twitter and LINE, 📛 is used closer to its literal meaning. Parents post it on the first day of preschool (入園式, nyūen-shiki) alongside 🌸 and 🎒. Teachers use it in classroom announcements. Japanese cosplayers use it when roleplaying a character in a school uniform. There's also a small but persistent wrestling/sports fandom joke where 📛 gets used to introduce a nickname, since in Japanese pro-wrestling posters wrestlers often have tulip-shaped name plaques at entrance arches.

The 📛 emoji is one of the Japanese cultural emojis that came into Unicode through the KDDI and SoftBank carrier emoji sets that Google and Apple helped standardise into Unicode 6.0 in 2010. At the time, the goal was backward compatibility with Japanese mobile phones, which had been using pictograms since the late 1990s. Emojis for uniquely Japanese objects, 📛 among them, came along for the ride.

The real-world object the emoji depicts is a nafuda (名札, literally 'name plaque'). The word dates to the Edo period (1603-1868), when merchants and artisans used small wooden plaques to identify their wares. Over centuries the word generalised to any personal identifier worn on clothing or posted on a door. The tulip design specifically comes from Japanese kindergarten culture, where flower-shaped fabric badges have been standard since at least the 1960s. You can still buy them today on Amazon Japan and in Daiso stores for about 100 yen each.

The emoji was designed to be recognisable to Japanese users and was classified as a 'symbol' rather than an 'object' by Unicode. That classification is why Emojipedia ended up filing it under 'Alert' alongside ⚠️ and ☣️: the shape reads as 'warning-adjacent' even though the object itself is cheerful preschool stationery.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F4DB, Name Badge. Part of the Japanese-carrier backward-compatibility batch alongside 🎏, 🔰, and 🎎.
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0. Apple ships its first iOS version: a bright red tulip with a white plaque, thick outline.
3. 2016Google Noto redesigns its emoji set; the name badge becomes more rectangular and less floral than Apple's. Samsung ships a glossy version on Galaxy S7.
4. 2017[Jeff Atwood tweets](https://x.com/codinghorror/status/888510237405085696) asking why the 'name badge' emoji looks like a fireball. The tweet goes mildly viral and cements the 'tofu on fire' nickname in Western tech circles.
5. 2018[SoraNews24 publishes a full explainer](https://soranews24.com/2018/11/30/whats-the-real-meaning-of-japans-burning-tofu-emoji/) titled 'What's the real meaning of Japan's burning tofu emoji?' which becomes the top-Googled source for 📛's origin.
6. 2020Apple updates 📛 in iOS 14.2: slightly slimmer petals, softer gradient. Still unmistakably a tulip to anyone who knows the reference.
7. 2021Unicode 14.0 adds 🪪 Identification Card, the 'real' ID emoji. 📛 usage drops slightly in contexts where users previously defaulted to it for any ID-related post.
8. 2023Microsoft Fluent redesigns 📛 as a flat orange shape. The MS version loses most of the tulip detail, becoming the most abstract rendering in the wild.

• •📛 is the Unicode character for 'name badge,' but the official CLDR short name is 'name badge' while the Japanese canonical name is 'nafuda' (名札). The two names describe very different objects: an English name badge is a clip-on plastic rectangle; a nafuda is a hand-sewn fabric tulip pin.
• •Japanese kindergartens sell the real-world tulip badges for 90 to 270 yen (around $0.80 to $2.40). You can buy multi-packs on Amazon Japan and in Daiso stores. Colours include pink, yellow, orange, and white, but the red version is by far the most common. That's why Unicode picked red.
• •The Edo-period origin of the word 名札 (nafuda) referred to wooden plaques used by merchants and artisans to identify their wares, not people. The personal-identification meaning developed in the Meiji era (1868-1912) when Japan industrialised and factory workers started wearing identifiers.
• •At traditional Japanese inns (ryokan) and sumō training stables, wooden nafudakake (名札掛け) boards hold plaques with the names of wrestlers or guests. The modern kindergarten tulip is the same cultural gesture, softened for kids. 📛 is the emoji of this centuries-long tradition.
• •Typing 'nafuda' on a Japanese IME pulls up 📛 on the first suggestion page. Typing 'name badge' on an English keyboard doesn't always work: on Apple's iOS keyboard as of 2026, you have to type 'badge,' which brings up 🔰 and 🏅 before 📛.
• •Jeff Atwood's 2017 'is this a Japanese thing?' tweet isn't the first Western 📛-confusion post, but it's the most-cited. Earlier confusion posts exist on Tumblr's Emojinalysis (2013) and in the original Apple emoji-design critiques from 2010.
• •Emojipedia classifies 📛 under 'Alert' alongside ⚠️ and ☢️, not under 'Office' or 'School.' The reason: its red, tapered shape reads visually as a warning, even though the object itself is cheerful. It's the only kindergarten supply in Unicode's alert family.

• •Jeff Atwood tweet (July 2017): The Stack Overflow and Coding Horror co-founder tweeted on July 21, 2017: 'Can anyone explain why "name badge" emoji looks like a fireball? Is this a Japanese thing?' The tweet collected thousands of replies from Japanese users explaining the tulip and became the go-to citation for Western explainer articles about 📛.
• •SoraNews24 'burning tofu' explainer (2018): SoraNews24's 2018 article introduced the English-language nickname 'tofu on fire' and is still the top Google result for 'name badge emoji Japan.' It's been republished in translation on at least six sites.
• •Know Your Emoji 'most misunderstood' lists: 📛 is a fixture on every 'emojis nobody uses correctly' listicle from Thought Catalog and Yahoo Lifestyle to Mashable. It usually sits at #1 or #2, jockeying with 💮 (White Flower) and 🈴 (Japanese 'Passing Grade').