A Tanabata tree, a type of wish tree on which people hang wishes written on paper strips known as tanzaku (短冊) and other decorations during Tanabata, a Japanese festival celebrating two heavenly lovers. Depicted as one or two stalks of green bamboo, from which hang one or more slips of paper, generally red.

May be used to represent Tanabata, wishes, festivals, bamboo, or Japanese culture more generally. May also be used to represent various plants or the color green more generally.

Apple’s design includes a yellow star decoration, while WhatsApp's slip of paper has a star on it.

Earlier Google designs featured multiple bamboo stalks and several differently colored strips of paper, while Microsoft’s design previously displayed a green branch with three differently colored pieces of paper. Facebook's initial design depicted a smaller bamboo branch with a single large red strip, while Toss Face's initial design depicted only two bamboo stalks, omitting the hanging paper decoration entirely.

This emoji predates the inclusion of emojis within Unicode. It was first added to early Japanese emoji keyboards by au by KDDI in 2003, though it had representation in earlier pre-emoji Japanese character sets as well.

Tanabata Tree was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.