For years after the introduction of mandatory elementary education for boys and girls in 1872, some of Japan’s pupils commuted in horse carriages. Servants who carried their belongings accompanied them to school. In 1876, a school called Gakushūin made it known that it would no longer allow the class status of pupils’ families carry onto the school grounds. Gakushūin first introduced school uniforms and, in 1885, the school adopted a schoolbag that was modeled after the Imperial Japanese Army officers’ backpack. Initially made of black leather, its measurements were standardized so that all pupils, whatever their socioeconomic means, would carry the same bag. Yet, it was the very inequality of these means that prevented the egalitarian policy from materializing. Far into the twentieth century, randsel remained a considerable expense even for a middle-class family with three or more children, many of whom would have attended elementary school at the same time.
Despite these formidable obstacles, by the 1950s, the randsel became Japan’s elementary school pupils’ standard school backpack. To this day, most elementary school pupils use one, in no small part due to the fickle workings of nostalgia and memory. Particularly in the minds of parents and grandparents, the randsel symbolically carries the emotional capital assigned to childhood. This capital is rendered as both the very consumer goods that mark the child as a child and the time of childhood to be remembered, commodified, and thus immortalized. Parents of preschool children get “caught up in a randsel craze” in seeking the best one for their (typically, only) child—often purchasing them far in advance. A randsel association has created its own theme song and video. Today, randsel are available in all kinds of materials and at all price levels. For the last hundred years or so, the shape and measurements, however, have remained almost exactly the same.
And so it appealed to the Japanese public when, in an effort to bring healing magic to children in disaster areas, a number of humanitarian campaigns involved collecting thousands of used “randsel full of memories” that were then sent to children whose childhoods had been disrupted by disaster or war, ranging from the 2011 triple disaster in Northeastern Japan (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown) to the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, by 2020, an international NGO had collected and sent 2.2 million randsel to Afghanistan alone.
A once uniquely iconic Japanese elementary school backpack, has come to signify an inherent contradiction of capitalist culture: the intimate interconnections of consumer acts and emotional life. The randsel facilitates the expression and experience of nostalgia and has been crafted through the social relations by which it has been circulated and mobilized. Finally, it reiterates specific notions of childhood from its beginnings in the Imperial Japanese Army of the late 19th century to Afghani children at the beginning of the 21st century.
Sabine Frühstück is Distinguished Professor and the Koichi Takashima Chair in Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the co-editor of Child’s Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan (University of California Press, 2023) and the author of “Crafting Nostalgia: Emotional Capital and the Randoseru’s Victory.” Journal of Material Culture (March 2025), Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (University of California Press, 2023), and other publications on gender and sexuality, violence and militarism, and the history of the body.
