Woman Bowing Emoji

A woman bowing deeply, head lowered toward her hands. This emoji represents dogeza (土下座), the most extreme form of apology and deference in Japanese culture. Dogeza involves kneeling on the ground and touching your forehead to the floor, and it's reserved for situations where a regular "sorry" won't cut it. In Japan, it's the deepest possible bow, historically used when commoners encountered nobility or when someone has committed an offense serious enough to require total submission.

The base emoji (🙇) was added in Unicode 6.0 (2010) under the name "Person Bowing Deeply." The female variant 🙇‍♀️ arrived in Emoji 4.0 (2016). In Japan, its meaning is clear. Outside Japan, things get confusing. Western users have interpreted it as someone getting a massage, doing push-ups, resting their head on their hands, or praying. The pose doesn't exist in Western body language, so people filled in the blank with whatever familiar pose it resembled.

In texting, 🙇‍♀️ has settled into a few roles: sincere apology ("I'm so sorry 🙇‍♀️"), gratitude ("thank you so much 🙇‍♀️"), making a request ("can you please 🙇‍♀️"), and the dramatic over-apology used for humor ("I ate the last slice 🙇‍♀️🙇‍♀️🙇‍♀️").

On social media, 🙇‍♀️ gets used across a spectrum from genuine to ironic. The sincere use is for apologies and grateful acknowledgments. Content creators use it when thanking followers for milestones: "100K followers, I'm not worthy 🙇‍♀️." Customer service accounts sometimes drop it when resolving complaints.

The ironic use is more common among younger users. Triple 🙇‍♀️🙇‍♀️🙇‍♀️ after a minor inconvenience is exaggerated politeness played for laughs. "I accidentally liked your photo from 2019 🙇‍♀️" is the energy.

In anime and manga communities, it carries extra weight because dogeza is a well-known anime trope. Characters performing dogeza for comedic effect is a staple of the medium, and fans use 🙇‍♀️ to reference those moments.

On Japanese social media, it's used more carefully because dogeza carries real cultural gravity. Using it casually might come across as tone-deaf to Japanese users, similar to how casually throwing around "I'm so traumatized" bothers people who've experienced actual trauma.

🙇‍♀️ is never flirty. It's an apology and deference emoji. The emotional register is humility, gratitude, and formality, none of which are romantic signals. If someone you're interested in sends 🙇‍♀️, they're apologizing or thanking you, not flirting.

• •After a late reply? Genuine apology. Not flirting.
• •After asking for a favor? Polite deference. Not flirting.
• •Triple bow after a minor offense? Ironic humor. Still not flirting.
• •Paired with ❤️? The heart is doing the work, the bow just adds gratitude.

🙇 is dogeza rendered as a Unicode character. Dogeza (土下座, literally "sitting on the ground") is a Japanese form of prostration where you kneel, place your hands flat on the ground, and touch your forehead to the floor. It's the most extreme form of deference in Japanese social protocol.

The practice traces back centuries. The *Gishiwajinden* (魏志倭人伝), the oldest Chinese account of encounters with the Japanese (3rd century CE), describes commoners prostrating themselves and clapping their hands when encountering nobles on the road. Over time, dogeza formalized into a ritual of deep apology or earnest request.

Japanese bowing culture (ojigi) operates on a scale. A casual eshaku (会釈) at 15 degrees is a peer greeting. A keirei (敬礼) at 30 degrees is standard business courtesy. A saikeirei (最敬礼) at 45-70 degrees is deep respect or serious apology. Dogeza goes beyond even saikeirei: you don't just bend, you go all the way to the floor. In modern Japan, it's reserved for the most grave situations and appears far more often in anime and TV dramas than in real life.

Corporate Japan has a complicated relationship with the public bow. When Mitsubishi Motors' CEO apologized for two decades of product defects, he bowed for a full minute at a press conference. Sony's executive bowed for seven seconds after a data breach. The duration and depth of the bow became the story.

The emoji captures this tradition in a single glyph. Japanese mobile carriers included the dogeza pose in their original emoji sets, and it made the cut for Unicode 6.0 in 2010. Western platforms had to render a gesture that most of their users had never seen in person, which led to the push-up and massage misinterpretations that persist today.

The base 🙇 was approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F647U+1F647 under the name "Person Bowing Deeply." Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. The female variant 🙇‍♀️ was introduced in Emoji 4.0 (November 2016) as a ZWJ sequence: U+1F647U+1F647 + U+200DU+200D + U+2640U+2640 (female sign) + U+FE0FU+FE0F. Originally sourced from Japanese carrier emoji sets where the dogeza pose was a standard character.

1. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as 'Person Bowing Deeply' (U+1F647), sourced from Japanese dogeza↗
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0 with broad platform support
3. 2016Emoji 4.0 adds gendered variants: 🙇‍♀️ (woman) and 🙇‍♂️ (man)
4. 2017Google retires blob design, 🙇 becomes a clearly human figure bowing

In Japan, dogeza is serious. It's the nuclear option of apology. Using it casually in Japanese society would be like dropping to your knees in a Walmart to apologize for bumping someone's cart. People would stare. In modern Japan, it appears far more often in fiction than reality, and Japan Railways has even listed commanding employees to bow as a form of customer harassment.

In Korean culture, deep bowing exists (jeol, 절) and is part of formal occasions like New Year celebrations and weddings, but it doesn't carry the same dramatic weight as dogeza.

In the West, the emoji lost its specific cultural meaning and became a general-purpose deference/apology symbol. Western users also frequently misread it as someone getting a massage, doing push-ups, or resting their head on their hands. The pose simply doesn't exist in Western body language.

In anime and manga fan communities globally, dogeza is well understood as an extreme apology trope. These communities tend to use 🙇‍♀️ closer to its original meaning than the average Western texter.

• •The text-based ancestor of 🙇 is "orz" (or OTL/OTZ), a pictographic emoticon where the letters form a kneeling figure: O = head, r = arms, z = body. It spread from Japanese imageboards around 2002 to Korean and Chinese internet culture.
• •When Mitsubishi Motors' CEO apologized for two decades of hidden product defects, he bowed at a press conference for a full minute. Sony's executive managed only seven seconds after a data breach. In Japan, the duration of the bow became the story.
• •Japan Railways specifically lists commanding employees to bow (dogeza) as a form of customer harassment that warrants service refusal. The emoji is fun, but the real gesture carries enough weight to be legally significant.
• •The oldest known description of Japanese prostration comes from the *Gishiwajinden* (魏志倭人伝), a 3rd-century Chinese text. Commoners would drop to the ground and clap their hands when encountering nobles.
• •In a 2013 viral incident, a customer named Manami forced two Shimamura store employees to perform dogeza and tweeted the photo. The backlash was enormous, sparking a national conversation about customer harassment in Japan.

• •Western users frequently see 🙇‍♀️ as someone getting a massage, doing push-ups, or resting their head on their hands. The bowing pose doesn't exist in Western body language, so people fill in the blank with familiar alternatives.
• •Using 🙇‍♀️ casually with Japanese friends or colleagues can come across as tone-deaf. Dogeza is the most extreme apology in Japanese culture. Dropping it for minor things like being 5 minutes late would be like filing a wrongful death suit over a parking ticket.

• •Dogeza is a staple trope in anime and manga, used for both dramatic and comedic effect. Characters in shows like Gintama, Naruto, and One Piece perform it in moments of extreme contrition or when begging for something impossible.
• •Quartz's analysis of Japanese corporate apologies documented how companies like Sharp, Panasonic, and Mitsubishi use deep bows at press conferences as a formalized ritual of public contrition. The article became a reference for understanding Japanese corporate culture.
• •The "orz" emoticon, born on Japanese imageboards around 2002, depicted the dogeza pose in ASCII art before the emoji existed. It spread to Korean internet culture (as OTL) and Chinese platforms, becoming one of the most recognizable pictographic emoticons in East Asian digital culture.
• •The Shimamura dogeza incident (2013) became a case study in customer harassment when a viral tweet showed store employees forced to prostrate themselves. The incident influenced Japanese labor policy around acceptable customer behavior.

• •ZWJ sequence: U+1F647U+1F647 (Person Bowing Deeply) + U+200DU+200D + U+2640U+2640 (Female Sign) + U+FE0FU+FE0F (VS-16). Total: 4 codepoints.
• •Supports skin tone modifiers on the base person character.
• •Shortcodes: :bowing_woman::bowing_woman: (GitHub), :woman-bowing::woman-bowing: (Slack).
• •The original Unicode name was "Person Bowing Deeply," which is more descriptive than the current "Person Bowing." If you're building emoji search, include both names.
• •Sentiment analysis note: this emoji is ambiguous between apology (negative trigger) and gratitude (positive trigger). Context-dependent classification is necessary.

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