A Japanese schoolgirl's bag in the late nineties usually held a book as thick as a textbook, its cover papered over with stickers, and not one line of coursework inside it. To find out who she knew, who she was close to and who she had spent the summer with, you only had to borrow it and turn a few pages.
The Japanese called it a puri-chō, a purikura album. It was not a family photo album but something else entirely, because most of the pictures in it had not been taken by the girl who owned the book. Somebody else had handed them to her.
The sticker album was a profile page before profile pages existed
A puri-chō was made to be shown rather than stored. Its owner would spend hours arranging each sticker until the page looked right, writing captions beside them, drawing, cutting images out of magazines to fill the gaps, and what came out of those afternoons was an object you could open and read almost the whole of somebody's social life from.
The thickness of the book said something out loud that nobody had to put into words. A thick album meant a lot of people had given you their pictures, and what that meant in turn was understood by every classmate without anyone explaining it.
None of this is a piece of nostalgia that has long since gone quiet. In the summer of 1997 there were forty-five thousand sticker photo machines running in Japan at once, and by the 2023 figures eighty-six percent of Japanese teenage girls had taken purikura within the previous year.
The sheet came out already perforated, and that was no accident
The sticker sheet coming out of the machine was never a single piece. It arrived with a tear line down the middle, so the first thing a group did on stepping out of the booth was pull it apart along that line and each take half.
Before the tearing there was one more stage, which Japanese calls rakugaki, literally scribbling. The whole group stood at the decorating screen together, one adding a bow, one writing the date, one putting down a line that only the people in the booth would understand, so by the time the sheet came apart both halves carried everybody's handwriting.
Read closely, the machine had assumed two things before you ever put money into it. It assumed there was more than one of you inside, and it assumed you would hand half the sheet to somebody before you got home.
The booths in shopping centres today still do exactly that under a different name, printing one four by six inch sheet and cutting it into two identical strips on the way out. Who built that machine and why it became a phenomenon is a story of its own, but nobody has found a reason to drop this particular detail in thirty years.
Only a thing you can hand to one person becomes a gift
What separates half a sticker sheet from an image file is not quality, and it is not even whether you can hold it. It is that the half sheet genuinely leaves your hands, whereas sending the file to one person and sending it to a thousand cost exactly the same effort.
And when sending something costs the sender nothing, the person receiving it understands perfectly well that it cost nothing. That is why a picture dropped into a chat slides out of memory within two days while half a sheet with both your faces on it sits in a wallet for years and survives several changes of phone.
Japan is demonstrating this at the moment in a faintly absurd way. The sticker sheet still comes with the session there, exactly as it did thirty years ago, while downloading the digital copy of the very picture you just took now runs on a monthly subscription.
The purikura market there once reached around a hundred billion yen and has since fallen to roughly a fifth of that, but what fell was the number of sessions rather than the habit itself. The machine got smaller; the tear line stayed exactly where it was.
Somewhere to keep them is being rebuilt from scratch
Printing came back, and with it came somewhere to put the prints. Stationery shops in Korea and Japan now sell clear sleeves cut to strip size, small ring binders and plastic pockets, the sort of album that holds around twenty strips at four to a page.
What those albums record is not a series of separate sessions. The same handful of faces, photographed in different districts a few months apart, laid out in order, stop being photographs and turn into the diary of a friendship.
Some people laminate the best one so it cannot curl, others slide it behind a clear phone case. That printed pictures are returning to walls, wallets and the edges of screens belongs to a much wider shift and is not particular to strips, but what is particular to a strip is that it was designed to exist in two copies.
A digital copy has no tear line, so you have to draw one
This is where shooting in a browser differs from a booth in a mall, and differs unfavourably. The booth cuts the sheet for you and puts two copies in your hand, while the file you download is one, exactly one, and it duplicates so easily that none of the duplicates is the one meant to be given away.
A strip shot in the browser comes out at 1200 by 3600 pixels, which is two by six inches printed at 600 DPI. A ten by fifteen centimetre sheet of photo paper, the cheapest size and the one every shop carries, fits two of them side by side.
So redrawing that tear line is simpler than people assume: put two copies into one file, have a single sheet printed, then cut down the middle. Which paper size holds how many copies is already set out in a table, and the cutting is one pass with a pair of scissors.
It sounds like fussing over nothing, and it changes what the picture is. Printing one copy is making a keepsake for yourself; printing two is making something to pass on, and after a few years those two decisions have led to noticeably different places.
How long a photograph lasts is decided by whoever receives it
There is something slightly backwards that the puri-chō makes very clear. The pictures that lasted longest in one were never the ones its owner took and kept, but the ones somebody handed over, because a picture that was given carries the afternoon two people spent standing in a booth together.
A photograph you keep yourself can be filed anywhere and forgotten anywhere, and nobody is any the wiser. A photograph you give away sits in somebody else's wallet, and every time they open it the thing comes back at them, in a place you have no control over at all.
Seen that way, getting a copy back to everyone who was in the frame stops being a piece of tidying up at the end. It is precisely the job the 1995 machine had built into the paper, except that now there is nobody left to do it for you.
The right question is not where to keep it
People who have just finished a session tend to ask where the picture would look good, which is the one question the machine never asked. For thirty years it asked only this: whose hands is the other half of this sheet going to end up in.
A strip of yourself alone has no other half, and that is perfectly fine, only it is a different sort of object. A strip with two faces on it printed once is missing half of itself, even when neither of the two people notices.
So the next time you step out of a booth, the thing worth thinking about is not which frame or which grade, since both were settled before the countdown started. It is how many copies to print, and who gets the second one.