Thirty Years of Photo Booths, From Tokyo to Daegu and Back
The strange new machine in a 1995 arcade
It started with an idea from Sasaki Miho, who worked at a game company called Atlus. In 1994 she watched schoolgirls collecting and swapping stickers and pictured a machine that printed your photo as a sticker. Her company was not impressed, and the proposal sat unapproved for a while.
The idea got approved the next year. In February 1995 the machine Atlus built with Sega showed up in arcades under the name Print Club, which everyone shortened to purikura. As it caught on, the booths spread beyond arcades into fast food shops, train stations, karaoke rooms and bowling alleys.
The best part of purikura comes after the shutter. You scribble words and hearts on the screen, pick the retouch that makes eyes bigger and skin smoother, then print a sticker sheet for your pencil case or planner. Peeling one off for a friend is part of the ritual.
The machines reached Korea in the late 1990s and filled the busy shopping streets. Plenty of adults still remember the tiny sticker photo taped inside a pencil case. Once camera phones became normal, though, the booths got harder and harder to find.
The four-cut reboot that started in Daegu
The four-cut studio we know today opened in Daegu in April 2017. The brand was called Life Four Cuts, and this time the output was not a sticker sheet but a long strip with four frames lined up inside a black border.
The vibe is clearly different. Purikura was a machine that changed your face; the four-cut booth is closer to one that hands you a frame and a pose. It puts a natural look ahead of heavy retouching, and fills the gap with props, lighting and a wall of frame options.
It scaled fast, too. Korea Tourism Organization figures put the number of unstaffed four-cut studios in Korea at 1,006 in 2023 and more than 3,000 in 2024, with over 80 percent of users in their teens and twenties. That is why spotting a booth on the way home from school feels ordinary now.
Full circle, back to Tokyo
In 2022 Life Four Cuts started heading abroad: Japan, Taiwan, China, Vietnam and the Philippines, plus the United States and Europe. In January 2025 it installed a booth inside Tsutaya, often called Japan's biggest lifestyle retailer, at the Kashiwa Station store, and said it planned self studios in around 50 Tsutaya locations by the end of that year.
Photoism opened in Shin-Okubo in August 2025, after Shibuya, Harajuku and Shimokitazawa. Korean-style booths now stand in the city where purikura was born. Thirty years, one full lap.
The machines changed but the scene inside the booth did not. Four people squeeze into one small box, throw a random pose as the countdown runs, then split the printed strips one each. The only real difference is that the strip now lives inside a phone case instead of a pencil case.
By the time you are inside the booth it is too late to think, because the countdown is shorter than you expect. Waiting in line is the moment to prep on your phone. Put the line you want to hold up on the DoYouBox LED Sign, carve a stamp of the day with Name Seal, lock your frame concept with the My Inner Animal Test, and the fumbling inside the booth gets a lot shorter.