Japanese “vacancy” button

What 🈳 means

The kanji 空 ('empty' or 'sky') in a box. It means vacancy: open rooms, seats or spaces.

Hotels, parking lots and booking signs in Japan use 空 to show availability. Its opposite is 🈵, which means full. Since the character also means sky, some people use 🈳 for the sky or for emptiness.

Facts

Japanese “vacancy” 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 :u7a7a: or :japanese_vacancy_button:. People also look for it with words like “Japanese”, “button”, “ideograph”, or “vacancy”.

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