Japanese “service charge” button

The katakana サ (sa) in a box, short for sābisu, the Japanese word for 'service'. It stands for a service charge or a service item.

It is rare in chat, and outside Japan few people can read it, so it mostly appears as a curiosity. When it is used, it flags a service fee or something extra that comes with the service.

Facts

Japanese “service charge” button 🈂️ is an emoji in the symbols category, under alphanum. It is one of the early emoji from Japanese phones, standardized in Unicode 6.0 (2010). On GitHub, Slack and other apps you can type it as :sa: or :japanese_service_charge_button:. People also look for it with words like “Japanese”, “button”, “charge”, or “katakana”.

Timeline

1. 2010Added to the emoji standard (Unicode 6.0)

Design history

Google Noto Emoji images: Apache 2.0. Twemoji graphics by X Corp and contributors: CC-BY 4.0.

symbols · Unicode 6.0