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Purikura

July 18th, 2003

Something which has been all the rage with many young girls in Japan are the “Purikura” (short for “Print Club“)–photos taken of usually two or more people at a special photo booth, decorated with visual baubles and printed out on photo or sticker stock. I mention it now because, eating my Double Burger here at McDonald’s, I have just spotted a gaggle of schoolgirls who not only have some of these pictures (a grid of them, usually 16, printed out on postcard-sized paper, then cut up into smaller-than-postage-stamp sizes), they have tons of them. Books full of them, each page filled with dozens of them. Granted, these are the typical faddish schoolgirls with the ridiculously large loose-sock styles, but the sheer number of stickers each had, representing a great deal of time and money to generate, was rather astounding to me.

I had seen these portraits many times before, but had never seen or heard of where or how they were produced. After dining out in Kichijoji recently, Hiromi took me into one of the places that made them and we took a few. The shop she took me to had perhaps a dozen of the booths, each with different mechanisms and themes. The newest were ones that allowed a great deal of pre-made stamps and photo embellishments to be added.

Although considerably cheaper than a passport-photo booth, it was quite a bit larger and well-designed. It was easy to see what photograph would be produced, and after posing for several photos and choosing the best ones, one is given a few minutes in which to ‘paint’ the photos. There are touch-sheet binders filled with frames, shapes, photos and frills; tap the image you want applied, and then paint it onto your photo where and however many times you want. You are given what seems like quite a short time to make the additions, but I suppose they have to clear out the booth for the next people.

Finally, you choose the size and layout, then wait for the photos to be printed. I was a bit surprised at the complexity of the process, and a bit taken aback that I had paid perhaps twice as much for some boring passport photos not too long ago–you’d think the passport photos, simple by comparison, could be priced quite a bit cheaper.

But then, not quite so many schoolgirls buy quite so many passport photos, pasting them into collector’s albums….

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