You're trying to make me feel bad, but you're doing it with a false dilemma: Either we stick emoji in Unicode or the Japanese are screwed and we told them to "fuck" off. This is a false dilemma, and exactly the sort of thinking that worries me as we fuzzily expand the charter of Unicode beyond a universal grapheme repository. I say there's plenty of third options, many of which are better choices than jamming it into the international all-purpose standard.
Unicode is supposed to be the central hub for all graphemes, but I would certainly like to see some argument that emoji are actually graphemes. For one thing it's quite bizarre that suddenly Unicode appears to be specifying colors as well as shapes, which is one bright line I'd be concerned about. (There may have been colors before but they would be much more exceptional, and I'm not aware of any.) Unicode was ambitious as the all-grapheme repository, it's simply a guaranteed failure if it tries to become the repository of all vaguely iconic/smilyish/little pictures in the world.
Japanese do mix emoji with kanji and kana. Are emoji any less graphemes than the mor pictographic han characters? I don't think the colors are normative though, any more than the exact shape is. A different representation of a love hotel ought to be fine.
The colors I'm referring to are the ones in the names of the code points, such as the ones the Germans complained about It doesn't get much more normative than that.
Ah, that grapheme doesn't actually have color IIRC, but the hair is not filled, thus giving the impression of a fair-haired person (rather than dark haired)
Unicode is supposed to be the central hub for all graphemes, but I would certainly like to see some argument that emoji are actually graphemes. For one thing it's quite bizarre that suddenly Unicode appears to be specifying colors as well as shapes, which is one bright line I'd be concerned about. (There may have been colors before but they would be much more exceptional, and I'm not aware of any.) Unicode was ambitious as the all-grapheme repository, it's simply a guaranteed failure if it tries to become the repository of all vaguely iconic/smilyish/little pictures in the world.