Provenance — where it came from
In the mid-1990s, a machine appeared in Japanese game arcades: step inside, pose, and receive a sheet of tiny photo stickers. Its product name was プリント倶楽部 — “Print Club.” Japanese, which shortens everything, cut it to purikura.
High-school girls made it a culture. Friends packed into the booth, traded stickers, and pasted them into dedicated notebooks (プリ帳, puri-chō) — a paper social network a decade before the real ones arrived. The machines evolved to serve their users: skin smoothed, eyes enlarged, legs lengthened. Long before phone filters existed, teenagers in Japan already expected a camera to improve reality.
The word is a trademark that went generic, like “escalator” once did in English. Decades later, the booths still stand — and the word still means any of them, whichever company builds it. The brand dissolved into the language and became permanent there.
Field notes — how it’s used
プリクラ撮ろうよ
purikura torō yo
“Let’s take purikura!” — said outside arcades since the mid-1990s.