There are a lot of really fun, extremely popular things in Japan that are vastly ignored or impossible to find in the United States. Karaoke places are one of these things. Purikura is another. Purikura (pronounced “poo-di-coo-da”) is basically just like an extension of photomachines in the united states. Sounds lame, right? Maybe? Well, here’s how it works.
You are hanging out with a group of people, some of whom happen to be Japanese girls. Japanese girls loveeee their Purikura. No matter what section of Tokyo you are hanging out in they will, inevitably after some time has passed yell, “Purikura!!!!” Then your group of people will look ardently for one of these machines. It won’t take very long because there are billions of them scattered in obvious locations on the ground floors of huge arcades. You will all split the cost of the machine (around 4 dollars) and very shortly after you put the money in great chaos will ensue. Really fast, peppy Japanese music will start playing and a high pitched Japanese girl’s voice will be saying things that you will not be able to understand. Everybody will shuffle around madly trying to find the best position (think musical chairs) and you all freeze and get ready for the picture when you hear the only thing you do understand: ”San… ni… ichi…” *click*. This happens about 8 times, with different time intervals between each picture. When it’s all over you get to draw and decorate around each picture on a seperate machine. It’s extremely intuitive and easy to use and they give you lots of time to put tons of hearts or huge black bondage hats that say “GAY” on them or whatever else you can find on the machine. The whole process is really well done and, actually, a surprisingly large amount of fun. This is good considering I’ve been here for a week and already done it 4 times.
After it’s all over the pictures are printed out on a grid on a sheet of paper painfully small so you can cut them out and everybody can have a copy of each one. A square inch is probably about as big as they come. A nice feature of the machine though is that you can transfer a couple of the pictures to your cell phone through infrared. You can then forward that picture to everybody else and they can keep a larger copy on their phones. In the computer lab today I scanned in a recent one of these so you can gaze upon the Purikura wonder yourselves. You can read more about Purikura here. My favorite line: “Purikura is generally used by teenagers, especially girls.” Oooops.
Oh, on another note I conquered and destroyed those slippery noodles today with chopsticks. Woo! Watch out, Japan!
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