Explore everyday life in Japan
Maybe you have heard of them. Or maybe you have seen pictures or videos of them online. Purikura photo booths. They can be found in many places in Japan: game centers, electronics stores, stations, and some department stores. And they are a lot of fun.
Basically, they are the analog version of SnapChat, a photo booth that allows you to decorate pictures of you and your friends with all manner of stamps, stickers, animal parts, and free-form graffiti. Though they appear to be mainly used by groups of girls and the occasional young couple, and sometimes a group of friends looking to make a funny piece of memorabilia at the end of a fun night or reunion, they can be a lot of fun for travelers passing through Japan.
Many Purikura photo booths have instructions written on their touch screens in Japanese and in English, so anybody with a basic level of English will be able to fumble through the process of taking, decorating, and printing their pictures. I say fumble because, even with written directions, each stage of the process, from choosing the format and the background of your picture card to taking and decorating the pictures themselves, is usually governed by a time limit. This means that as you familiarize yourself with the buttons on the touchscreen, your time is running out.
To take really good pictures, you need to be quick and have Purikura experience. That said, most of the fun involved with taking Purikura pictures comes from not being good at it and the hilariously bad pictures you often end up with as a result of being kept to time limits while not knowing what you are doing.
After having fumbled through the process of choosing your pictures’ format, taking the pictures themselves, and decorating them, your pictures will be printed as stickers that are attached to a single postcard-sized piece of photo paper. These stickers can be, and often are, cut up and divided amongst friends. If you ever find yourself inside of a Japanese junior high school, you will find the insides (and sometimes outsides as well) of many girls’ pencil cases to be covered in Purikura pictures of them and their friends.
For 400円 (a little less than $4USD), you can spend thirty minutes or so having fun and feeling silly while getting a memento for your trip to Japan. I highly recommend it.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.