The fact that there's a unicode character for the entire word "Fax" is intriguing. There is also a character "Tel," which makes me wonder if these characters were intended to simplify the generation of e.g. fax cover pages by using a single character to prefix the caller number information. That said I can't find characters "From" or "Re" which would also be typical of that use.
This comes from legacy iconography of some old Japanese character sets. For round trip compatibility and politics many seemingly pointless/redundant characters survived into Unicode.
For example Greek capital alpha, Cyrillic letter A, and our Latin letter A all look the same but each has its own code point. There’s a ton of that.
The origin of emoji is not Japanese computers but mobile phones (keitai), which were quite advanced compared to what was available elsewhere until the iPhone, hence a lot of weird and obsolete images that appear in them.
As I understand, it's actually more or less the rule that same glyphs that are semantically different - e.g. letters in different alphabets - are represented by different codepoints. One exception was made for CJK, and that because they were trying to fit everything into the 16-bit space that Unicode had at the time. And that exception was itself extremely controversial.
Since I remember these debates as they unfolded: an existing code block for various alphabets was typically used for, as I said, round trip compatibility and what was seen at the time as reduced complexity for migrating old code.
“Han unification” was caught bitterly and the lack of alphabetic unification was cited by opponents that the motivation was racist. I have a strong opinion as to how Han unification should or should not have been conducted, if at all, however I recognize the strength of the counter argument as well so to avoid flame wars I don’t express my opinion.
Given that this comment is a deep reply to a reply and probably will never be seen this shows how hot tempers flared at the time, and perhaps still do.
