Visiting FuRyu Purikura Company

I was lucky enough to be invited to visit FuRyu purikura company in Tokyo recently!

They found my blog through internet searching and contacted me a few weeks ago. They wanted a foreigner's perspective on purikura, and as I think I have the only English purikura blog they asked me to go in for a chat. I happened to be going to Tokyo for a friend’s birthday trip to Disneyland so we arranged to go to the company as well.

There were a few floors of offices but we met in the Purikura Lab which had about six machines there. It was like a quiet, clean game centre! I got a peek at a couple of yet-to-be-released machines which I am now looking forward to trying out. We talked to a lovely guy there, I can’t say much about what we discussed but it was fun and interesting to talk to someone in the business of purikura.

All the machines were working and he said we could take as much as we liked, except for the not released machines. So we took purikura four times!

The first one we took is currently on location test. It’s the one in the top picture, Girls’ Photographer.

It has a few unique features, the collages are social media inspired so they have ‘updates’ across the top and you could change the location if you wanted. You can also decorate with pens on the collage. It’s the first editable collage I’ve seen.

It also had a Halloween course which, if I remember right was at the beginning along with the main course options. This included backgrounds and special stamps.

The second time we took this machine we had been given some toys because the company also makes toy catcher machines, so we decided to try the course for many people. (Toys are people too!) I really like that you can add many names for the stamps (up to eight I think). There was a spelling mistake on the collage but we told the guy and he said they’ll fix it for the main launch. Which makes this collage kind of rare. 

After that we interspersed talking with taking pictures. We threw away any pretence of being cool or grown up and used our Disneyland Halloween stuff to take Rumor:

And finished off with Milk Beauty2:

It was a fun and interesting afternoon, I hope we helped the company a bit, and I’m looking forward to doing proper reviews on the new machines!