What is the oldest emoji?

The earliest emojis predate Unicode. A handful of symbols encoded in Unicode 1.1 (1993) — like ☺ ☹ ☀ ☁ — later became “emoji” retroactively when Unicode 6.0 (2010) added proper emoji presentation. The first batch designed as emojis was Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 set for NTT DoCoMo.