The World as Photo Booth Women’s Digital Practices from Print Club to Instagram in Japan

The practice of taking and uploading photographs using Instagram’s filters and effects can be viewed as an extension of purikura culture. Purikura, a colloquialism for “print club” (purinto kurabu), are photo booths that allow users to take photographs, edit the photographs using a stylus and touch screen, and receive instant prints of these photographs. The term may also refer to the instant prints themselves, which double as stickers and are often small enough to be placed inside of a wallet or pasted onto a phone. Since their introduction in 1995, purikura have been core to girls’ culture and sociality, and sometimes but not always coalesce with larger kawaii culture.¹

Purikura centers bear gendered indexes, as they are often decorated with pink hues and images of young women (Figure 1). This gendered nature is evident in signs within some purikura centers that ban boys and men from using the booths unless they are accompanied by at least one girl or woman (Figure 2). While such signs signal how purikura centers attempt to “protect” this gendered environment of play—one dominated by schoolgirls—it is important to note that this banning practice is exclusionary and poses issues for trans and nonbinary people.

Purikura are material assemblages that also involve a set of practices. First, users pay the fee to use the photo booth using the machine’s coin slot and determine the default settings for their session. These settings include default edits related to skin tone and eye size, along with the desired layout of the final print product. Users then enter the photo booth itself via its vinyl curtains. The inside of the booth bears a green screen backdrop and floor, bright lights, a camera, and a miniature monitor that relays visual instructions and suggestions for poses. Users step a certain distance from the photo booth’s camera and begin posing for photos. Throughout the process, an automated voice—always feminine—offers instructions and initiates the countdowns.

After the photo-taking process, users head to the rakugaki (graffiti) booth to edit their photographs. This process of editing may involve the augmentation or slimming of bodily features, the addition of makeup, the addition of silly stickers such as animal ears, and the writing of text. After this stage, users then select the edited photographs that they wish to have printed. Contemporary purikura allow users to input their email address or mobile phone number to receive digital copies of their edited and original photographs. After selecting their desired photographs, users wait for the photographs to be printed. The prints emerge from a tiny slot located toward the front of the booth. After receiving their prints, users can cut individual photos using nearby scissors and exchange these photos with their friends.

Figure 1.

The interior quirks of a purikura center, July 17, 2017. Photo by author.

Smartphones and visual-centric Social Networking Services (SNS) such as Instagram constitute portable purikura. The filters, stickers, and editing features on Instagram are not unlike those found within the process of rakugaki. Most importantly, smartphones and SNS have become enveloped in the media ecology of purikura (Figure 3). Manufacturers of purikura such as Makesoft offer their own smartphone apps that ease the process of saving digital copies of purikura and sharing these copies on SNS. In conversations with young women, I learned that it was not uncommon to “research” potential poses and editing strategies for purikura on Instagram. This saves stress and time during the practice of taking purikura. The prevalence of hashtags such as #purikura pōzu (#purikura pose) demonstrate reliance on user-created content as a source of information and inspiration. Purikura culture is becoming even more convergent.

Figure 2.

A sign banning the presence of unaccompanied men, July 17, 2017. Photo by author.

Over the course of my fieldwork in Japan, I noticed that the cost of purikura had increased steadily. I asked Hitomi, a high school senior, about the fate of purikura: would these photo booths survive, or would they eventually be displaced by SNS such as Instagram? Hitomi answered that the practice of taking purikura and the practice of taking photographs on Instagram are different experiences. With regards to purikura, individuals are ultimately paying for an experience, for the practice of “being together.” Ultimately, the practice of collectively brainstorming or researching poses, performing these poses, and editing the photographs into a tangible keepsake marked purikura as a distinctive bonding experience.

Figure 3.

A spot within a purikura booth, near the machine’s main camera, in which users can rest their smartphones and concurrently record videos, November 10, 2019. This highlights the increasingly convergent nature of purikura booths. Photo by the author.

The visual participatory culture of Instagram is reminiscent of the participatory nature of purikura. During my fieldwork, I observed that several establishments serving food that was deemed instabae or “Instagenic” had a designated photo-taking area complete with a backdrop (Figure 4). Such establishments were especially common in Takeshita Street in Harajuku, a hub of youth culture that is also lined with purikura centers. Here, we may consider how the smartphone camera becomes analogous to the camera within photo booths. The smartphone camera’s flash, accessories such as ring lights, and the use of lightening filters on SNS such as Instagram become analogous to the lighting assemblage found within photo booths. The world becomes a photo booth, and surroundings become a green screen backdrop.

The ubiquity and embeddedness of mobile media and platforms in everyday life—in the case of my research, smartphones and SNS such as Instagram—coincide with media mix’s emphasis on the inseparability of

Figure 4.

A photo corner in an ice cream store on Takeshita Street, August 15, 2020. Photo by author.

image and lifeworld. In his groundbreaking work on the concept, Marc Steinberg explains that media mix “coincides with the expansion of the media environment into the lifeworlds of human subjects such that it has become increasingly inseparable from all aspects of contemporary life.”² As an anthropologist, I find this embeddedness or inseparability to be the most generative aspect of media mix, as it yields rich insight into commodification, the intricate social and mediatized lives of subjects, space, and processes of worldmaking.

Scholarship on media mix has understandably centered on anime and fan cultures. Steinberg highlights that the emergence of anime “as a system of interconnected media and commodity forms” in the 1960s—evident in the franchising of Tezuka Osamu’s Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy)—would inspire the development of media mix. In this regard, analyses of media mix cannot be separated from anime.³ While this scholarship has been illuminating, I propose that there is room for an expansion of media mix to new contexts beyond anime and manga. An expansion of media mix into mobile media studies and platform studies is necessary, given the heightened integration of SNS in transmedia marketing and storytelling. Such an expansion can motivate scholars to concurrently examine the affordances of mobile media and platforms, the embeddedness of these technologies in everyday life, and the social spheres that are mediated by these technologies. These examinations can ultimately pave the way for further expansions of media mix beyond media industries—for example, to industries such as tourism and interior design. To illustrate the possibility of expansions of media mix to other contexts, I want to highlight the growing embeddedness of Instagram in the media mix of girls’ culture in Japan. Throughout my fieldwork on digital sociality, instabae culture and Instagram on a broader scale were narrated as primarily dominated by girls and young women. Several “Instagram Lectures” that I attended, which were hosted by marketing specialists in the Tokyo metropolitan area, instructed companies on how to appeal to women consumers via Instagram. One lecture that I attended was even marketed specifically for women, offering tips on entrepreneurial usage of SNS.

Gendered social spheres and divisions of labor have long been of interest to anthropologists and ethnographers of Japan. As anthropologist Amy Borovoy has explained, the ideal of ryōsai kenbo (good wife and wise mother) was used by statesmen in the Meiji era to promote Japan’s projects of “modernization and nation-building.”⁴ The home became a sphere of authority and empowerment for women, leading to the emergence of the “professional housewives” of the late 1950s and 1960s. Women’s labor—emotional and physical—as housewives and mothers served as the backbone of the spheres of schools and companies that were related to the perceived “economic postwar miracle” of Japan.⁵ This was and still is evident in mothers’ involvement in children’s education, especially in the context of the rigorous system of standardized exams in Japan. We also see this intimate care take on other forms in contemporary Japan—for example, the role of “citizen scientist” taken on by mothers in Fukushima as they monitor radiation levels in food sources.⁶ With regards to the gendered divisions within the workplace, sociologist Yuko Ogasawara has examined the division of labor in Japanese corporations between salarymen (salaried workers) and “OLs,” or office ladies.⁷ Sociality among young girls in schools has also been examined, ranging from sociolinguistic examinations of schoolgirl speech to the creation of the subjectivity of the schoolgirl via film and anime.⁸ Consumerist play has been noted as a core component of girls’ sociality, and is a theme that is especially relevant to my own research inquiries.

In this article, I map the flows of change and continuity as they relate to the intersections of gender, sociality, consumerism, and visual participatory culture in contemporary Japan. I propose the inclusion of mobile media and platforms into media mix discourse due to their growing embeddedness in media and social worlds. Using the case study of instabae culture and Insta-gram use among girls and young women, I highlight how “new” mediatic assemblages involving mobile internet, smartphones, and SNS are extensions of the historical and ongoing forms of gendered socialities and worldmaking practices that characterize the media mix of girls’ culture. In doing so, I also gesture toward a theory of media remix that acknowledges the “remixing” of longstanding practices within certain social spheres while also considering the role(s) of the participatory and creative affordances of SNS in contemporary media environments. Examinations of media (re)mix in and of girls’ culture, I argue, should address sociality and play alongside questions of dissonance and exploitation. I conclude with a discussion of the promise of media (re)mix in cultivating opportunities for transhistorical and transnational analysis.

Context Matters: Keitai Studies and Instagram

In conducting research on seemingly “ubiquitous” technologies such as SNS and smartphones, we must consider the temporal, spatial, and societal dynamics that impact the localization, use, and imagination of digital technologies in various contexts.⁹ In the case of Japan, the smartphone must be discussed in tandem with keitai (mobile phones). Anthropologist Mizuko Itō characterizes the keitai as a sociocultural object, a “snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device supporting communications that are a constant, lightweight, and mundane presence in everyday life.”¹⁰ What has been noteworthy of the keitai in a historical context is the introduction of the i-mode mobile internet service in 1999 by NTT DoCoMo.¹¹ This offering of mobile internet in Japan was a stark contrast to internet offerings in locations such as the United States, which centered on personal computers.¹² The perceived particularity of keitai is evident in linguistic terms such as garakei. This term combines “Galapagos” and “keitai” to hint that the technological assemblage of the garakei—a flip phone that includes a built-in camera and mobile internet—adapted to the environment of Japan.¹³ Marc Steinberg brings attention to the fact that Android and iOS, mobile platforms that currently dominate the global market, were modeled after keitai and the affordances of i-mode.¹⁴

Keitai culture has been heavily associated with youth culture, particularly schoolgirl culture. Scholars of keitai studies have explained that this association originated with pager culture in the early 1990s—while initially used as a business medium by salarymen, schoolgirls transformed the Pocket Bell pager into a social tool that could also be personalized through decorative stickers. Youths, and schoolgirls in particular, also transformed the keitai in a similar manner through the personalization of the devices as fashion accessories.¹⁵ In dialogue with these scholars, I examine the smartphone and the heightened connectivity afforded by 5G technology as a moment in the genealogy of keitai studies. An updated examination of mobile phones and youth culture in Japan should focus on the amplified affordances of smartphones and the prevalence of SNS, which are often viewed as inextricable from the hardware itself.

Instagram, a visual-centric SNS, brands itself as a platform that fosters closeness with individuals and passions, transcends spatial-temporal borders through the perusal of global content, and builds interest-based communities that encourage self-expression.¹⁶ Instagram originated in the United States. However, Ian Spalter, former head of design of Instagram, comments on Japan as being a point of inspiration in the visual aesthetics embodied by the platform. In a feature episode on the documentary series Abstract: The Art of Design, Spalter speaks of his first encounter with Japan. As images of Japanese stationery stores flicker across the screen, viewers listen as he highlights what he perceived to be a high degree of attention to detail in Japan:

I actually went to Japan the first time with a research trip and I was like, ‘Uh, what is this?’ When you think about the things we value, the Insta-gram design team, and things I value personally . . . around attention to detail and craft, there’s probably very few cultures that hold that up as high as Japanese culture. It’s a place where all the details kind of just tickle you. Everything feels pretty considered. And you’re just soaking all that in. So, it’s stimulating in a different way.¹⁷

Spalter eventually moved to Japan and is currently head of Instagram Japan. Within the episode, a team member of Instagram Japan observes that while “selfies” are common among Instagram users in the United States, users of Instagram in Japan do not share selfies as frequently and demonstrate differences in sharing patterns.¹⁸ Spalter raises a question with regard to Insta-gram’s place in Japan’s smartphone ecology: “It’s a product that people use all the time. So, how does it fit in with the mix of other applications that they may have on their device?”¹⁹

I am interested in the comments made by Spalter and his team because these comments highlight a necessity to examine the localization of global platforms. Instagram was cited by the young women with whom I spoke as the most popular SNS in Japan at the time of my fieldwork (2019–20). Hana, a shakaijin (postgrad) in her mid-20s, described Instagram as a platform where the user may “have fun by looking at images.” Conversations with interlocutors revealed that the popularity of Instagram is attributed to its role in allowing users to stay in touch with friends, view their daily updates, and “follow” accounts that embody shared interests and hobbies. Riko, a university student, spoke extensively of her use of Instagram in exploring her interest in home design. This exploration involved following #industrial on Instagram and bookmarking posts that served as inspirations in room decor. Marketing specialist Amano Akira suggests that the act of searching for information via hashtags is displacing the act of searching for information on search engines such as Google—a shift from “googling” (guguru) to “tagging” (taguru).²⁰ This shift can be attributed to a sense of trust in user-made content. When users visit a location and document their experiences, other users may view this documentation as more “authentic” than mainstream corporate marketing.

Along with the pursuit of interests, Instagram grants users a degree of self-expression and creativity—or as Grace, a shakaijin, stated, the ability to “broadcast yourself.” In this vein, it is not uncommon to have multiple accounts to show different content or “selves” to different audiences. Himawari, a high school senior, mentioned that high school girls can typically have up to ten Instagram accounts. When describing the creation and use of multiple accounts, interlocutors such as Himawari used the categories of “real” or “main” account (hon aka; 本垢) and “sub” account (sabu aka; サブ垢). In discussions of the dichotomy of hon aka and sabu aka, the former was characterized as curated and public facing while the latter was characterized as “private,” or interest based. A third category of ura aka (裏垢) was introduced as a “secret” and anonymous account used for darker purposes of cyberbullying.

Vibrant visuality is yet another reason for Instagram’s popularity. A discussion of Instagram usage in Japan would be impossible without an examination of instabae (インスタ映え). Possible English equivalents of this term are “Instagenic” or “Instaworthy.” However, a more accurate translation may be “Insta-shining,” as the term is a combination of “Insta” and “to shine.” The term also draws upon mibae, or attractiveness. As these nuances suggest, instabae refers to aesthetically pleasing scenes, objects, or sites that are deemed worthy to photograph and upload onto Instagram. Within a Google Image search, instabae is represented by images of pastel-colored objects and places (Figure 5). Suggested search categories that appear on the page’s header include “Hawai‘i,” “photogenic,” and “sweets.” A search of #instabae on Instagram itself yields images of delectable sweets and young women posing in front of picturesque locations or food (Figure 6). #Instabae supotto (Instagenic spots) constitutes one of many popular instabae-related tags (Figure 7). While we see that instabae images bear similar themes of pastel hues and sweetness—in terms of actual sweets and the overall affect of the image—the qualifiers that determine what is or is not instabae are subjective. When I asked young people to define instabae, there was a consensus that there is no “definition” per se, as it is contingent on the gaze of the user. Inter-locutors did, however, offer their own interpretations, frequently invoking adjectives such as kawaii.

In discussing instabae and photographic practices in Japan, we must consider the shift to “iphoneography” and the heightened affordances of the smartphone camera.²¹ Edgar Gómez Cruz and Eric Meyer have proposed that the smartphone—specifically the Apple iPhone—marks the emergence of a fifth moment of photography characterized by “complete mobility, ubiquity, and connection.”²² The integration of the keitai camera in Japan’s social fabric in the 1990s suggests that this fifth moment arrived in Japan long before the emergence of the iPhone.²³ Nevertheless, Instagram is a valuable case study of the fifth moment brought about by the smartphone. Instagram—and by extension, the smartphone camera—has become a lens for how to view one’s own surroundings. Instabae’s focus on the picturesque combined with Insta-gram’s filtering affordances ultimately, as Gómez Cruz and Meyer suggest, “changes the politics of seeing the banality of images of everyday life.”²⁴ The experience of being becomes strategized as an experience of documenting and being documented based on a particular aesthetic.

Figure 5.

Google Image search of instabae. Screenshot, April 19, 2021.

Instabae and Instagram are valuable case studies of the contemporary media mix. On one level, the embeddedness of the trend and the platform itself accompanies the embeddedness of smartphones and SNS in everyday life—a mediatization of the everyday. On a second level, the vibrant visuality of instabae and Instagram has become integral to sociality, transmedia marketing, transmedia storytelling, and practices across various industries and (sub)cultures. For example, as instabae becomes a lens for experiencing surroundings, it has subsequently become a central part of planning trips and experiences. As I later demonstrate, tourism agencies have jumpstarted campaigns that center on “photogenic travel.” In a public address in 2017, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō even proposed instabae as a potential key to stimulating regional economies, a moment that further highlights the growing commodification and embeddedness of instabae in Japan’s media mix and physical landscape.²⁵

Figure 6.

Search of #instabae on Instagram. Screenshot, April 19, 2021.

Figure 7.

Suggested instabae-related tags on Instagram. Quantity of posts as of April 19, 2021.

The visual participatory culture of instabae relies on the transformation of photographic objects and landscapes into vibrant digital representations. This involves the use of the heightened affordances of the smartphone camera, the filtering affordances of Instagram, and the affordances of third-party editing platforms. In this regard, the photographic objects and landscapes become “remixed.” Remix is inherent to digital participatory culture, and designates the creative appropriation and reuse of existing media forms to new ends by media consumers, users, and artists.²⁶ Hart Cohen has explained that since digital participatory culture, modes of engagement, and “authorship” are constantly evolving, concepts such as remediation/remix and convergence must constantly be recalibrated.²⁷ In this vein, I propose a recalibration of media mix theory that incorporates participatory cultures in/of SNS, which are deeply embedded in the social fabric. A theory of media (re) mix includes an examination of the “remixing” practices that are carried out by user-consumers, along with the ways in which industries and entities—governments, corporations, and the like—aspire for or co-opt this remixing. Furthermore, a theory of media (re)mix involves an acknowledgement of change and continuity. After all, “new” media are often an extension or augmentation of so-called old media.²⁸ Since media, practices, and (sub)cultures are co-constitutive—meaning that they build upon each other across time—any associated theorizations must also account for change and continuity in media industries and cultural practices across time periods and media forms. In the following section, I discuss the integration of Instagram and instabae within the media mix of girls’ culture in Japan—a “remixing” of girls’ culture.

Digitizing Women’s Worlds

Literary and media scholar Tomiko Yoda has pointed out that historically, marketers and tourism campaigns such as Dentsū’s “Discover Japan” (DJ) campaign of the 1970s have targeted women consumers. The visuals of this campaign, Yoda notes, did not focus on specific tourist spots—rather, the visuals “foregrounded the ambience heightened by the unexpected chemistry between the women and their surroundings.”²⁹ The dynamics at play within the DJ campaign echo what Yoda characterizes as “girlscape,” or the “mediatic milieu, disseminated via a variety of media channels, linking feminine bodies, affects, objects, and environment.”³⁰ Yoda explains that the strategic targeting of young women by tourism campaigns resulted from the perception that young women were not “bound” by societal rules and could thus travel freely and potentially influence other consumer demographics.³¹ The appeal of gendered youth marketing furthermore relied on the subjectivity and affect embodying “girl thinking and girl feeling.”³²

Yoda’s discussion of girlscape and the DJ campaign is highly applicable to the transmedia, mobile practices of instabae. While specific locations are featured in magazines or webpages that highlight instabae spots, the vibrancy or potential for vibrancy is highlighted to a greater extent. There is an emphasis on the “photogenic” nature of these spots, along with the myriad ways in which the embodied vibrancy of these spots can be documented and enjoyed. Visitors are guided on possible forms of engagement with the ambience of the location, which may involve indulgence in local commodities. Another intersecting point between DJ and instabae is an emphasis on self-discovery and “subjective experience.”³³ Instabae campaigns wield the language of girl journeys (joshi tabi) to highlight the solo traveler, the (wannabe) influencer, and the digital auteur. By highlighting journeys, these campaigns also harken to a process of (self-)discovery through intimate time spent alone or time spent with intimate others.

Contemporary marketing campaigns target both women consumers and their social use of digital technologies—a remixing of girlscape. One example is the Nippon Travel Agency’s (NTA) #tabijeni campaign. #Tabijeni is a combination of the terms “journey” (tabi) and “photogenic” (fotojenikku). The campaign aims to promote local and international sites that center on the photogenic—or more specifically, the “Instagenic.”³⁴ The gendered nature of #tabijeni is made visible through its placement under the “Girls’ Trip” (joshi tabi) category of the NTA’s website. NTA’s suggested #tabijeni plans include instabae meguri (pilgrimages) within locations such as Kyoto and Melbourne. Yet another part of the #tabijeni campaign is the selection of “tabijeni ambassadors,” or Instagrammer travel reporters who post aesthetically pleasing photographs and videos of their travels. These ambassadors are featured on the NTA’s #tabijeni page; furthermore, the ambassadors market themselves as part of the #tabijeni campaign on their own Instagram “bios.” This relationship can be considered symbiotic, as the NTA benefits from the labor of the ambassadors’ posts and the ambassadors benefit from the added “clout” (eikyōryoku). This relationship, however, can also potentially be exploitative through lack of compensation for labor—a point that anthropologist Gabriella Lukács makes in her ethnography of women bloggers in Japan.³⁵

A second example is Dentsū’s continued focus on women’s consumption and lifestyles. In late January 2020, Dentsū’s GAL LABO, a planning team focusing on girl culture, began an online publication series titled Reiwa joshi no kizashi (Signs of a Reiwa girl).³⁶ The series aims to reduce the misunderstandings between adult women and “Reiwa girls”—those experiencing girl-hood in contemporary Japan—by examining current trends in girl culture. In the third publication of the series, Hikino Anna describes the Reiwa girl as a subjectivity embodied by sharing. Drawing upon interviews conducted with six high school girls, Hikino suggests that smartphones and SNS have transformed “alone time” into “sharing time.” According to Hikino, “alone time” is decreasing—in other words, even if one is “alone” physically, one is still able to connect with others digitally. Hikino provides the example of benkyō aka (study accounts) on Instagram. The visuals associated with these accounts and their associated hashtags include images of neat study desks, cute stationery, and timers. Hikino suggests that such images can serve as a source of motivation for youths who are also in the throes of exams or wish to develop skills in notetaking and the organization of study spaces.³⁷ I would like to add that youths may feel a sense of solidarity in viewing the efforts of other students, and this is important to consider within the context of Japan’s standardized examinations.

Just as transmedia marketing directed at women consumers has been remixed, girls’ culture itself has been remixed. When speaking to girls and young women about the role of SNS such as Instagram in their social lives, I observed that the terms hayari (trends) and tsunagari (connections) were especially prevalent. The participation in trends on Instagram constituted a social practice in and of itself. My conversations with Hitomi and Himawari, both high school seniors, revealed that the consumption and photographing of tapioca drinks—followed by the uploading of these images on Instagram—was a popular practice among young women (Figure 8). The practice of consuming such drinks was so popular that it bore its own verb in youth vernacular: tapiru. Connection was facilitated through the creation and use of hashtags, evident in hashtags such as #oshare na hito to tsunagaritai (#I want to connect with stylish people). Scholars of digital media have explained that hashtags on platforms such as Instagram can serve as markers of group identity and provide opportunities for connection.³⁸ My continued conversations with Hitomi and Himawari revealed some of the digital practices that are associated with their identities as joshi kōsei (schoolgirls). The status of joshi kōsei (JK) was important to both Hitomi and Himawari—both lamented that their time as schoolgirls was coming to an end. The strength of the “JK brand” as an embodiment of nostalgic youth fosters a sense of pride amongst school-girls that motivates self-branding. Schoolgirls brand themselves by adding the hashtag #jk to their Instagram posts and may denote their year in high school through hashtags such as #ljk (third year; literally “last joshi kōsei”).

The visual affordances of Instagram allow users to maintain their social connections through the acts of viewing, sharing, and branding. As Mako, a university student, conveyed to me, sharing photographs of daily activities on Instagram can spark small talk with friends both online and offline. In conversation with scholars of digital studies, I suggest that such a practice may be considered to be a form of phatic communion or phatic communication.³⁹ Phatic communion, as originally coined by Malinowski, refers to gestures or remarks that aim to advance social relations rather than convey information.⁴⁰ Scholars of digital studies have suggested that phatic communication is also at play within digital photography and SNS, as the practices of taking and uploading photographs can advance already-existing social relationships.⁴¹ I would like to add that visiting instabae locations with friends and documenting the experience online are social practices that can strengthen relationships. The uploaded posts on Instagram, like the material prints of purikura, serve as testaments of these relationships.⁴² Purikura booths and participatory culture of visual-centric SNS provide a space for gendered sociality and worldmaking.

Figure 8.

A strawberry milk tea with tapioca served in a plastic bottle resembling a seashell, September 1, 2019. Photo by author.

Fading Shine: Vibrant Visuality, Worldmaking, and the Question of Dissonance

If media mix worlds, as Steinberg proposes, “define lived experience,” there is also much room for ethnographic approaches to the media mix.⁴³ Doing an ethnography of media (re)mix practices and Instagram grants insight into worldmaking: how interlocutors move through spaces, how they document spaces, how they represent those spaces, and even how they understand the representations of those spaces. Within her ethnography of smartphone usage among young Muslim women in Copenhagen, anthropologist Karen Waltorp illustrates how online spaces are not parallel worlds; rather, these worlds are part of “everyday, emplaced, embodied living and webs of reciprocity.” For her interlocutors, “being online” is actually “a fundamentally social practice” of selective visibility.⁴⁴ I was intrigued by instabae culture and interlocutors’ use of Instagram, so I went to places at their recommendations, and sometimes accompanied by my interlocutors. While sitting at a coffee shop in Odaiba with Mako, she explained to me the sometimes-disappointing dissonance between the “shining” aesthetic of some locations as they are represented on Instagram versus how they actually appear “in reality” (riaru). “You said that instabae is better than riaru, why is that?” I asked. “So . . . if it’s riaru, it’s more shoboi (lackluster) than you thought . . . for example, have you been to the Shibuya Scramble Crossing?” Mako remarked, before breaking out into laughter. “Isn’t it so shoboi in person compared to how it looks on TV?” Mako asked.

I nodded and laughed in agreement. The Shibuya Scramble Crossing is one of the most crowded crosswalks in Tokyo. Media portrayals of the crossing often feature a bird’s eye view of the assemblage of pedestrians—so many in number and shot from such a distance that they appear as ants. The crossing is a popular tourist attraction and is perceived as an embodiment of the hustle-and-bustle of Tokyo life. However, the crossing arguably loses its “shine” in person. In my visits to the crossing, I was pushed around and the experience of joining pedestrians in crossing the iconic intersection was hurried and brief. The fluorescence of the large televisions combined with the booming voices of advertisements overloaded my senses. Yet despite the chaos of the crossing, visitors frequently posed for photoshoots in the center of the swarming pedestrians, scrambling to get their shots in before the walking signal turned red. “It’s surprising, isn’t it?” Mako began. “You’re really like, ‘This is it?!’ There are so many places like that, but you don’t want to show them in that state, right? Since you’ve made the effort of going.”

The experience of encountering this dissonance between online representation and offline experience, or what Mako described as a dichotomy of “shiny” versus “real,” was an uncanny one. This ethnographic encounter provokes a consideration of the dissonance between the online representation of experience versus the actual experience. This dissonance is also part of instabae, which is itself a remixing practice. Because instabae and Instagram are so ingrained in the sphere of girl sociality, there is a pressure to participate in trends. There is a socioeconomic element to this, given instabae’s emphasis on consumption, travel, and aesthetic. Hitomi commented that she eventually stopped participating in tapiru—the act of purchasing tapioca drinks with friends and documenting the experience—because it was draining her wallet. Young women noted that while Instagram is embedded in their social lives, they are aware that Instagram is not reality. They acknowledged that the pressure to obtain “likes” or represent a picturesque lifestyle was harmful. At the start of my fieldwork, Instagram had selected Japan as a region in which it would test the feature of hiding users’ ability to see the number of likes on other users’ posts. Himawari and Hitomi commented on this feature with a sense of relief. Himawari confessed that she uses Instagram mostly because it is popular among her peers. She observed that while uploaded photographs on Instagram are “shiny,” one cannot truly know if the user is actually having fun.

Instabae has also been associated with excess and waste. The term “Insta-flies,” pronounced as instabae yet written with the katakana for “house fly” (ハエ), emerged as a jab at instabae. The term implies that participants of insta bae are noisy pests that “swarm” around certain sites. A viral Tweet posted in August 2017 by user @ASTROONSEN featured a hand-drawn image of a green fly with square eyes bearing the pink, fluorescent Instagram logo. The image was accompanied by a taxonomic definition of Insta-flies as a parasite that preys on young women and enjoys trendy sweets and treats from Starbucks.⁴⁵ In 2019, conservative newspaper Sankei Shinbun released an article addressing the connection between food waste and instabae. The article’s illustration featured a chef gazing incredulously at two young women, both illustrated with ominous glaring eyes, as they coo: “So pretty!” There is an untouched strawberry parfait on the table behind the young women. The chef mutters in response: “They’re barely eating it . . . is this for Insta?”⁴⁶ These critiques of instabae hinge on stereotypes regarding age and gender and are not unlike the moral panic discourse surrounding the perceived lack of manners and “acceptable” interpersonal relationships among young keitai users.⁴⁷ However, during my fieldwork, concerns regarding waste and the overwhelming influx of visitors to instabae-related sites were indeed vocalized by business owners. In our conversations, Hashimoto, the owner of an upscale British-style pub, recalled stories that had been told to him by fellow restaurant owners in which younger customers ordered dishes for photographic purposes, rather than consumption.

When presenting my research, I am frequently asked if the girls and women who participate in instabae are “dupes.” The labor relationship between content creators and corporations—for example, the relationship between tabijeni ambassadors and the NTA—is part of media (re)mix.⁴⁸ The creative use of Instagram by young women is a form of “tacit labor” that may benefit the actors who are promoting instabae campaigns.⁴⁹ Young women may enjoy this creative use as a form of entertaining engagement without knowing that this engagement actually qualifies as labor that benefits an actor. This dynamic fosters debates regarding deception. In response to similar debates, Yoda has argued that girlscape in the historical context of late 1960s and early 1970s Japan was a political event because it enabled “a new distribution and mobility of feminine bodies in physical spaces and mediascape.”⁵⁰ I agree that the remixed girlscape of instabae and Instagram also offers empowering opportunities for mobility and the carving of gendered spheres of sociality. However, I would also argue that there is a need for critical inquiries regarding the impact of the infrastructures of extraction and surveillance that are endemic to SNS such as Instagram, which are ultimately managed by multinational corporations aiming to instill neoliberal sensibilities. Instagram users are knowingly and unknowingly contributing resources and labor. It is possible to examine media (re)mix and visual participatory culture from the lens of sociality and play while also acknowledging issues and questions of privacy, “agency,” the exploitation of user data, and algorithmic influence. Similarly, in the case of instabae culture, we can discuss the carving of gendered spheres of sociality alongside questions of socioeconomic exclusion, waste, disruption, and dissonance. This corresponds with media mix’s emphasis on the nuances of marketing and franchising, from production to consumption.

Conclusion: Media (Re)Mix Futures

Despite the “newness” of the circuities of gendered worldmaking in smartphone-enabled social sharing networks in Japan, there are continuities with historical and existing forms of gendered socialities. In this article, I have illustrated change and continuity in social practices and consumerism among Japanese girls and women by introducing the case study of Instagram as a medium of vibrant visuality in the media (re)mix of girls’ culture. Media mix theory is generative in that it uses a transmedia and transhistorical approach in describing the nuances of marketing and the embeddedness of media in everyday life. An expansion of media mix analysis into mobile and platform studies can allow scholars to integrate longer histories and existing transmedia practices in their examinations of “new” media forms. Just as purikura should be considered to be a precursor to Instagram, there are intersections between other longstanding playful practices and SNS. For example, anthropologist Sonja Petrovic has already drawn connections between karaoke and lip syncing on TikTok.⁵¹

Examinations of the intersections between society, social media usage, and smartphone usage have centered on the contexts of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Such examinations erroneously mark these contexts as a “universal standard.” In highlighting Japan, I seek to decenter this overwhelming focus in digital media studies. It is curious that despite its status as a pioneer in mobile communications, Japan is not well-represented in literature on SNS and smartphone usage. The media mix, a concept emerging from Japan and media studies scholarship in/of Japan, only underscores the strength and promise of mobilizing contexts and analytical frameworks beyond those readymade in Silicon Valley.