Background: Purikura, standing for "purinto kurabu" (print club), is an essential phenomenon of modern Japanese culture (particularly female culture). The basic concept is a photo booth where you take pictures with your friends, and then are able to edit the photos electronically. Today, my good friends Cori and Takashi will demonstrate what purikura is all about.
It costs 400 yen to take purikura. If there are four members in your group, this is quite easy to work out, but if it's any other number, you pretty much end up playing rock paper scissors to decide who pays. Also, unfortunately, it's really hard to take a picture of a room you're INSIDE OF, so I only have this. As you can see, there is a greenscreen in the back (how they do the backgrounds).
You sit and face a screen with a camera. There are various options to pick at this point, such as the backgrounds you want. All the while, the machine is talking to you in some cutesy Japanese voice and playing bubblegummy music. The cutesy voice will count down "3, 2, 1" while you and your friends arrange yourselves (you can see on the screen how you're going to show up in the photo, so everyone can make sure their faces aren't blocked, and everyone can fix their hair at the last second). Then the photo is taken and displayed on the screen.
Here's another picture of the booth. You can see the screen, the camera (right above the screen), and all of our crap on the floor.
In this picture you can see the booth (left) and rakugaki corner (right)
Just kidding, but there are only two pens so only two people can really participate at a time. Of course, if you're not editing at the moment, you can cram in and yell, "ooooh add this, add that!!" From the outside, rakugaki cornering friends look like this:
First select what photo to edit at the moment, and go! Time is counting down from 200 seconds I think, but if another group is not in the booth area, the timer will stop counting down and you get unlimited time until someone enters the booth. Therefore, the less crowded the purikura location you have chosen is, the more likely you are to have a long time to edit your photos. Purikura editing can range from 200 seconds at minimum, to... maybe half an hour is the longest I've ever spent.
You can write words, add stamps, put glittery things, shapes, basically there are a lot of options. On some more advanced machines you can change your friends' hair or eye colors.
There is typically another screen in the middle (see the photo in step 6) where you select what size you want the photos. This is important: all purikura comes on one single sheet, always the same size. Thus, you can choose to have a lot of really small pictures, or few bigger pictures. Most machines also have options that give you even numbers of each photo (you've typically taken and edited about 4-6 pictures) such that you can divide them evenly between the number of people in your party. There are usually options for 2, 3, or 4 person groups, and then "other" with varying sizes of photos. You also decide here if you want a photo sent to your phone, and if so, which, and you enter your email address. [Note: I have entered my email into a million of these machines, and never once gotten purikura spam. They seem safe to me]. You then wait for maybe a minute or so, and the sheet is printed out here.
When the sheet is printed, you want to distribute the photos evenly, so you have to cut it up first. There is always an area with scissors in each purikura location for this purpose. It's also, as can be seen by this picture, important to be extremely excited about cutting out your purikura.
An example of a single purikura photo from this expedition:
Step 1: Find a purikura location.
Usually they are located in or near game centers, in fairly populated locations. They are not like vending machines -- you aren't going to find one on your mountain hike. There are many of them in urban locations like Sannomiya and Umeda. There are usually lots of machines in one location, as can be seen in this photo.
Step 2: Pick a machine.
Every machine has slightly different photo backgrounds, lighting, and options to edit your pictures, and some are considerably more advanced than others. This one looks good enough.
It costs 400 yen to take purikura. If there are four members in your group, this is quite easy to work out, but if it's any other number, you pretty much end up playing rock paper scissors to decide who pays. Also, unfortunately, it's really hard to take a picture of a room you're INSIDE OF, so I only have this. As you can see, there is a greenscreen in the back (how they do the backgrounds).
You sit and face a screen with a camera. There are various options to pick at this point, such as the backgrounds you want. All the while, the machine is talking to you in some cutesy Japanese voice and playing bubblegummy music. The cutesy voice will count down "3, 2, 1" while you and your friends arrange yourselves (you can see on the screen how you're going to show up in the photo, so everyone can make sure their faces aren't blocked, and everyone can fix their hair at the last second). Then the photo is taken and displayed on the screen.
Here's another picture of the booth. You can see the screen, the camera (right above the screen), and all of our crap on the floor.
In this picture you can see the booth (left) and rakugaki corner (right)
Just kidding, but there are only two pens so only two people can really participate at a time. Of course, if you're not editing at the moment, you can cram in and yell, "ooooh add this, add that!!" From the outside, rakugaki cornering friends look like this:
First select what photo to edit at the moment, and go! Time is counting down from 200 seconds I think, but if another group is not in the booth area, the timer will stop counting down and you get unlimited time until someone enters the booth. Therefore, the less crowded the purikura location you have chosen is, the more likely you are to have a long time to edit your photos. Purikura editing can range from 200 seconds at minimum, to... maybe half an hour is the longest I've ever spent.
You can write words, add stamps, put glittery things, shapes, basically there are a lot of options. On some more advanced machines you can change your friends' hair or eye colors.
There is typically another screen in the middle (see the photo in step 6) where you select what size you want the photos. This is important: all purikura comes on one single sheet, always the same size. Thus, you can choose to have a lot of really small pictures, or few bigger pictures. Most machines also have options that give you even numbers of each photo (you've typically taken and edited about 4-6 pictures) such that you can divide them evenly between the number of people in your party. There are usually options for 2, 3, or 4 person groups, and then "other" with varying sizes of photos. You also decide here if you want a photo sent to your phone, and if so, which, and you enter your email address. [Note: I have entered my email into a million of these machines, and never once gotten purikura spam. They seem safe to me]. You then wait for maybe a minute or so, and the sheet is printed out here.
When the sheet is printed, you want to distribute the photos evenly, so you have to cut it up first. There is always an area with scissors in each purikura location for this purpose. It's also, as can be seen by this picture, important to be extremely excited about cutting out your purikura.
An example of a single purikura photo from this expedition:
2006-7:
2010: