Puri Kura

One of my favourite 'pastimes' in Japan - is an invention known as 'Purikura' - these can (and most certainly 'should' be) the most interesting photo booths you will ever meet in your life. Forget those boring photo booths in Boots and Tesco, that take your photo against a white backdrop, while your seated in a set position and you're not allowed to smile - purikura booths in Japan can have many people in one booth (and encourage it!), some booths have climbing apparatus and props, and you can have a variety of interesting colourful backgrounds!

You enter a large space inside the booth, choose a variety of backdrops which can be changed by a green screen. You take a couple of photographs, all in a variety of different crazy poses, and then, the most enjoyable part comes next! You leave the large 'photograph' area to go next door to a smaller 'editing' part of the booth - this is where there are two screens with electronic touch-screen pens. At this area, you can draw, write, stamp stickers, add borders - do allsorts to your photos to make your photos full of colour, garish, gaudy, crazy, zany and whatever other synonyms you can think of to accompany those adjectives! After that, you chose the best 4/5 or so, and then after a minute or so.....you receive a sheet of your photos as glossy small stickers! Brilliant! Recently a group of 10 or so people celebrated a local JETs birthday, and what better way to celebrate than with purikura!

Can you guess who's birthday it is? These examples of purikura were slightly crazier than normal - saying that, we could have probably fit a few more people in the booth! Normally a group of between 3-6 is highly recommended!