Google seems to have added iMode support so that mails sent from
japanese cellphones properly display emoji as little color images.
Awesome - I've been dying for this feature forever!

However, if an email is forwarded from gmail back to another Japanese
phone, these images are lost.  Is there some way to rectify this?

(I prefer giving people my gmail contact information, which never
changes, than my cellphone information that changes every time I leave
the country for an extended period.  This way when I come back, I just
have all my mails forwarded to my new Japanese phone.  But many people
use emoji so extensively that without them, the forwarded mails are
incomprehensible!)