Print Club...

...also known as purikura here in Japan,  is the unequivocal answer to all of my photo booth fantasies!  School girls galore fill notebooks upon notebooks up with these sticker photos, and at 400 yen ($4) a pop, they can easily spend small fortunes on them over the course of their impressionable years!  My obsession with retro photo booths in the U.S. has officially met it match...purikura booths had me at first "Cheezu!"

Sam and I found an arcade of these things during our Sapporo shopping frolic this past weekend, and we attacked, promptly:

There are booths upon booths of Print Club stations, fitting anywhere from 2-10 people (my people unit of measurement in this case being school girls)!  

For all your role-playing needs, there are also costume racks stuffed with Disney characters, football jerseys, yukatas, and Sam's favorite, Japanese school girl outfits:

The inside of this particular booth, with its green-screen stage area and lighting/camera panel, was fairly large and intimidating.  Mix that with cute, screechy, unintelligible Japanese-girl voice and J-Pop playing in the background and you have what most people would refer to as "a cultural experience!"

Did anyone ever watch Jem and the Holograms growing up?  This lighting/camera panel reminds me of Synergy:

The photo session inside the booth consists of 6-8 poses on various imposed backgrounds and green-screen effects galore!

After your photographic romp inside, you are then directed to the outside of the booth where you can draw on, stamp, and otherwise alter all of your photos in anyway imaginable!  This is also where you select your sticker sizes and have copies of them sent to your crazy Japanese cell phone:

Here are a few of our lovelies:

By the way, for those of you who were wondering...yes, we DID surpass the ages of everyone else there by a good 5-10 years!   This is only the beginning...