{"id":1104,"date":"2025-06-24T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shcydigitalchildhoods.org\/dir\/?p=1104"},"modified":"2025-06-25T08:50:43","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T08:50:43","slug":"carrying-the-randsel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shcydigitalchildhoods.org\/dir\/carrying-the-randsel\/","title":{"rendered":"Carrying the Randsel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For years after the introduction of mandatory elementary education for boys and girls in 1872, some of Japan\u2019s pupils commuted in horse carriages. Servants who carried their belongings accompanied them to school. In 1876, a school called Gakush\u016bin made it known that it would no longer allow the class status of pupils\u2019 families carry onto the school grounds. Gakush\u016bin first introduced school uniforms and, in 1885, the school adopted a schoolbag that was modeled after the Imperial Japanese Army officers\u2019 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image 2: An early Imperial Army knapsack (ca. 1930). Public domain.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Despite these formidable obstacles, by the 1950s, the randsel<\/em> became Japan\u2019s elementary school pupils\u2019 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<\/em> 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 \u201ccaught up in a randsel<\/em> craze\u201d in seeking the best one for their (typically, only) child\u2014often purchasing them far in advance. A randsel<\/em> association has created its own theme song and video<\/a>. Today, randsel <\/em>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image 3: Kurare\u2019s Afghanistan randsel <\/em>campaign. Public domain<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201crandsel<\/em> full of memories\u201d 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<\/em> to Afghanistan alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image 4: A current-day version of the Gakush\u016bin model. Photo by Sabine Fr\u00fchst\u00fcck.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Sabine Fr\u00fchst\u00fcck<\/a> 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\u2019s Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan<\/em> (University of California Press, 2023) and the author of \u201cCrafting Nostalgia: Emotional Capital and the Randoseru<\/em>\u2019s Victory.\u201d Journal of Material Culture<\/em> (March 2025), Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan<\/em> (University of California Press, 2023), and other publications on gender and sexuality, violence and militarism, and the history of the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For years after the introduction of mandatory elementary education for boys and girls in 1872, some of Japan\u2019s pupils commuted in horse carriages. Servants who carried their belongings accompanied them to school. In 1876, a school called Gakush\u016bin made it known that it would no longer allow the class status of pupils\u2019 families carry onto the school grounds. Gakush\u016bin first introduced school uniforms and, in 1885, the school adopted a schoolbag that was modeled after the Imperial Japanese Army officers\u2019 backpack. Initially made of black leather, its measurements were standardized so that all pupils, whatever their socioeconomic means, would carry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1112,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-childish-things"],"yoast_head":"\nCarrying the Randsel - Digital Childhoods<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/shcydigitalchildhoods.org\/dir\/carrying-the-randsel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Carrying the Randsel - Digital Childhoods\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For years after the introduction of mandatory elementary education for boys and girls in 1872, some of Japan\u2019s pupils commuted in horse carriages. 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