This is because all the best monolingual dictionaries in Japan - and the best Japanese language apps in general - are published on iPhone. What little advice I could find about monolingual dictionaries was almost exclusively aimed at iPhone users. There's plenty of advice on good Japanese-English dictionaries, because most Japanese language learners are still in the beginner-intermediate stages of study, but not much on monolingual dictionaries.

I was reminded of this fact after I spent a while googling for the title of this post myself and couldn't find anything. On top of that, I live outside the Great Region-locked Firewall of Japan and don't have access to all the apps that are available on the Japanese version of Google Play. While convenient for Japanese companies who can save on the software side and develop their apps just for iPhone, it's a bit inconvenient for people like me who have an Android phone. The word is a portmanteau of 'emotion' and 'ji' which means 'character' in Japanese. Incidentally, Japan's influence on the iPhone was what brought emoji to the mainstream. I'm not sure why this is - this article from The Verge points to a few possible factors, such as first mover advantage and a strong relationship between Softbank's Masayoshi Son and Jobs. It's a quirk of Japan that unlike the rest of the world where Android takes most of the market share (just over 75% of smartphones worldwide are Android phones) in Japan it's flipped the other way and most smartphone users have an iPhone - almost 80% as of the start of this year. It turns out there's a good reason for all the android discrimination in Japan and it's just a matter of catering for the market.

Even the Pokemon Centre - a wonderland with not only 300 different varieties of Pikachu merch (pencils, pillows, surfer Pikachu plushies, detective Pikachu plushies, bookmarks, socks, handcuffs, and dice ) but also plushies of Pokemon I didn't even know the name of - sold exclusively iPhone gear. I thought it was a one-off coincidence that the shop specialized in iPhone cases, before going into one, then another, then another phone case shop only to find that they were all pretty much exclusive to iPhone. The t-shirt problem is just because I'm 6'2 and Japan isn't made for giant savages like myself, but the phone case was because the shop only sold iPhone cases. When I found one I liked in a shop in Akiba it was just a little too small, like the many t-shirts over there that, while they might proclaim 'Medium' on the tag, pinch my shoulders and stop halfway between my jeans and belly button, making me look like an 80's Madonna. The first time I went to Japan I broke my smartphone cover and my poor wee Android Samsung Galaxy S7+™ was left shivering, naked in the cold.

Monolingual dictionary online .txt