ABSTRACT
Japan has offered the world an example of pictorial communication that has seemingly escaped scholarly 1 and even, for many, general attention. Readers of this book and related scholarly publications may not be aware of an immensely popular form of Japanese vernacular imagery known as Print Club. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce Print Club to visual social scientists by first describing this phenomenon and then placing its significance within the rich fabric of Japanese visual culture. In doing so, we discuss several emergent themes that help us connect our Print Club data to key features of Japanese society and culture, namely important issues of consumerism, youth culture and gender as related to the social order. Most non-Japanese people are not familiar with a form of photography that since 1995 has proved to be enormously popular in Japan, and that has begun to spread across the world. Conversely, it would be very hard to find a Japanese person who had not heard of Print Club. To Western ears, ‘Print Club’ is an awkward phrase of problematic meaning. In Japan, Print Club is also known as Purinto Kurabu or, in its most popular abbreviation and colloquial version, Purikura. Purikura refers to a combination of technology and photography, specifically a digital photo booth that within moments produces a small page of colour photo stickers. Though
considerable variation now exists, originally these machines delivered a page of 16 small, 20×25 mm colour photographs for 300 yen. Details of these postage stamp-sized pictures and recent developments are given below. The machine has been described as an ‘innovative revamping of the old instant photo booth’ 2 and appears like a cross between an automatic passport/licence photo machine and a video game. This booth contains a computer connected to a colour video camera and a colour printer. In the most basic terms, the machine provides users with a fast and cheap way to get multiple small images of themselves. Were there not much more to Purikura than this, we would not have much to say, but such is not the case. Given the continued popularity of Purikura well into the twenty-first century, one suspects that something else is going on. Clearly Print Club represents something different, and seems to provoke new and popular habits of personal representation, social affiliation and, perhaps, identity.
