Two high school students dressed in their school uniforms, adjusting their hairstyle in front of the long mirror in the lower floor of a supermarket in the upscale Shibuya district in Tokyo, while a group of students were putting the finishing touches to their apparition while waiting for their role to catch "Borikura".
And "Boricora" is a picture taken inside a type of stalls, a type of photography that was known to begin with 25 years ago, and formed a societal phenomenon at the end of the nineties of the last century, and it is still very popular in the archipelago despite the competition of smart phones and selfies that take it. Indeed, it is true to say that "Boricora" pictures are "grandmother" of selfies.
And unlike regular booths that are for one person, "Boricora" pictures allow to take pictures of a group of people, revise them, beautify them with some decorative additions, and even write them with a special pen.
"For us, these pictures are an indispensable element in our daily life," says Nonoka Yamada, a seventeen-year-old high school student.
"All of my class daughters take pictures of this kind, they make us look cute, and we change our faces," she says.
According to Yuka Kobo, an independent researcher who has devoted years to studying the phenomenon for years, that the Japanese youth’s desire for “Burekura” is a legacy of Japanese image traditions. In the Japanese image in general, the paradox is that the face shown by the person reflects his own individual character. Not his actual face, but the face that makes him.
In the art of "Beijing-ga" (drawings of people described as handsome), which is one of the oldest currents of ancient Japanese art of image, "the true beautiful faces of these people are not shown, but the face is painted white, and it is distorted to the point that recognition is no longer possible", according to what Cobo explains.
The Borikora market reached its peak in 1997, with revenues reaching 101 billion yen (about 689 million euros at the time).
However, the decline in this market was accelerated by the launch of smartphones, which include integrated cameras. The result was that Porecura's revenue fell to 23.9 billion yen (190 million euros) in 2018.
In that year, the number of "Borikura" booths in Japan was five times lower than in 1997, to be limited to 10,000. Although they are no longer everywhere, as in the past, these stalls have their fans, but they have adapted to the waves of fashion, which in turn is inspired by technological progress.
Primitive revision jobs appeared in 1998, and the facial recognition function that began in 2003 allows for focus on specific parts of the face, and was specifically behind the "big eyes fashion", says Cobo.
As of 2011, “technology has enabled the faces to be refined in a smoother way” “to look healthy, to have smooth skin and pain longer.”
"Porecura" seeks in recent years to demonstrate its integration with smartphones and social networks, and at the same time to distinguish itself from selfies by highlighting the collective nature of these images.
And "Boricora" devices now offer the possibility to download and publish pictures on social networks. Cubo notes that "the girls also envision their smartphones during the (Boricora) filming session, and they publish the video clip they filmed on Instagram, so that they can share the whole experience with others."
The researcher notes that "social media did not exist" in the nineties of the last century, "but the girls used to cut the 16 pictures that the paper that came out of the machine was carrying, so they paste a portion of the pictures on a special notebook, and take the rest of the pictures with them wherever they go, so be They share their friends with them or exchange them with them, ”just as they do today when publishing photos through social media.