Communicating Through Stickers
After school and on holidays, the sticker sections of stationary stores and general goods stores are teeming with young girls. Stickers are a major fad among five to ten-year-old girls in Japan today.
Girls get together at friends' houses to show their sticker books to each other—a fun and booming pastime.
3D stickers in a sushi motif (Cooperation: Kamio Japan Inc.)
Every kind of sticker imaginable is now available—soft, puffy 3-D stickers in motifs such as sushi; clear plastic capsule stickers filled with beads; stickers that hold multicolored liquid; even scratch-and-sniff stickers.
New stickers come out every day, keeping young girls riveted to stationary store shelves. Standing in front of rows and rows of stickers, eyes sparkling, they exclaim to friends, "This one's adorable!" "Hey, look at these!" The sticker sections of such stores are where these girls meet up and chat.
Every girl has a book designed especially to hold her favorite stickers, like animals or characters. As a fourth grade girl explains, "Between my sister and me, we have more than ten books filled with stickers."
A favorite amusement for young Japanese girls today is to get together at friends' houses to trade stickers. They tell us, "You can see what your friends are like by looking at their sticker books." "The fussy ones have very neat books." "That's right on!"… Just talking about their sticker books, their chatting goes on endlessly.
Store shelves are crammed full of a wide variety of stickers.
Collected stickers are saved in favorite sticker books.