How 'playing Puri' paved the way for Snapchat

What the evolution of photobooths says about the younger generation in Japan.

On a bright, chilly afternoon a pair of teenage girls bounded down the staircase leading to Sega Hi-Tech Land’s basement arcade, which sits beneath a café in Tokyo’s bustling Shibuya neighbourhood. They strode past the fighting games and shooting games, and barely stopped to glance at a row of gigantic machines filled with mountains of stuffed animals piled high beneath motorised grabbing claws.

They hadn’t come to play games, after all, but to have their photo taken together in one of Japan’s ubiquitous Purikura photo booths.

One of the girls, named Yuko, dropped four 100 yen coins into a slot on the side of the enormous, brightly-lit booth, then flung open a curtain hanging over its doorway so her friend Mari could step inside. The two girls posed for pictures, then viewed the images on a screen inside the booth and applied some filters that made their skin appear lighter, their eyes larger, and their faces thinner. The girls, who asked to be identified only by their given names, each printed out a few wallet-sized photos to take home as mementos of their friendship.

“I guess it is kind of like Snapchat,” Yuko says. “But it’s permanent and real, not just something for your smartphone.”

“You just choose some way in which you want to be cuter and the machine does the rest,” says Fumiko Sato.

The first Purikura booth machine, called Print Club, debuted in arcades across Japan in 1995, and allowed users to pile into a booth, take a few photographs, and print them out as stickers that could be placed anywhere. Sales were sluggish at first, but the game company Sega, which produced Print Club in conjunction with patent-holder Atlus, pulled off a promotional coup in early 1996 by having the boy band SMAP feature the photo booth on their television variety show. Print Club soon became a massive hit with young girls, who had all but vanished from Japan’s arcades as fighting games gained popularity throughout the 1980s. By the summer of 1997, there were some 45,000 Purikura booths spread across the country, with Sega controlling half of a market then estimated at around 50 billion yen (£345 million).

Purikura inventor Atlus, in conjunction with game makers like Sega and Dai-Ichi Kosho, were soon scrambling to come up with innovations to keep the machines relevant, and in 1998, they added features like the ability to alter photographs by scribbling graffiti or symbols like hearts and stars. The ploy worked: A decade after the first booths were launched, one survey showed that 43% of Japanese girls aged 10-15 called Purikura the activity that they were “most into” at that time.

The popularity of Purikura, anthropologist Laura Miller then observed, was due to a mix of the practical and the novel. Booths typically accommodate between four and eight people, making them perfect for commemorating social outings among groups of young people, and unlike the camera phones of Purikura’s early years, the booths allowed users to customise and modify their photos, infusing them with personality and charm.

“It’s not just about having a commemorative photo, but creating something that reminds you of how fun and carefree the moment was,” Fumiko Sato said of Purikura’s charm. Sato, who is 24, works at Purikura Calla Lily, a Tokyo storefront filled with nothing but Purikura booths. But unlike the classic booths, which allowed users to draw graffiti and place fun symbols over their photos, modern Purikura machines are equipped with sophisticated photo editing software that emphasises both beautification and frivolity.

Using a stylus, Sato demonstrated how users could alter, for example, the shape of their eye, the colour of their lipstick, or the lightness of their skin.

“You just choose some way in which you want to be cuter,” she said, “and the machine does the rest.”

As smartphone camera technology has advanced, social mobile apps like Snapchat and Instagram have increasingly added features that seem to have been inspired by Japan’s Purikura machines – first by letting users scribble graffiti or type text over selfies, then by adding features that “beautify” the final image in some way. At Calla Lil in Shibuya, one of the more popular photo editing options are cat whiskers or bunny ears users can add to their photographs, just like on Snapchat.

It makes sense that Japan’s original Snapchat would now be looking for cues from the popular mobile apps it inspired. In 2009, Atlus left the Purikura booth business, as better software and better cameras made the machines vastly more expensive to develop and produce. Japan’s Furyu Corp., which entered the Purikura business in 1998, maintains a leading position in the market for modern booths, selling $219 million worth of machines and sticker supplies in the financial year 2017.

The key to success, however, is not necessarily having the best software, but having the best available market research on what today’s generation of young Japanese women find “kawaii,” or “cute.”

“The pixel count of the photos and the number of colours available aren’t what makes a booth profitable,” a company spokesperson said. “Whether or not it can take a cute photograph is all people care about.”