Searching Emojis With Casual Japanese Keywords — Why Unicode CLDR's ja Annotations Aren't Enough

If you type "わらう" (laugh) into Slack's emoji search, you get nothing. The same is true for "ぴえん" (a sad-cute slang for crying that took over Japanese Twitter around 2020), or "ばんざい" (a celebratory "hooray"). Unicode's CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) ships official Japanese annotations for every emoji — but they're written in the register of an accessibility caption, not a search query. I curated 107 emojis by hand with the casual Japanese tags people actually type, and wrapped them in a ~20