The Ever Expensive Randoseru

    When I was a kid, every year meant a bunch of new expenses for my parents as school started and undoubtedly the list of school supplies required by the schools would come in. We would race off to one of the big box stores and our cart would fill up with construction paper, notebook, binders, pens, and so many other things we were just expected to have. Every year, one item not on the list but always in our cart would be a backpack.

    In the same spirit as the famous quote by Sir Terry Pratchett on the expense of being poor, we could never invest much in a backpack and they would always inevitably give out, sometimes within the same semester of purchase. As far as I can remember, no bag ever cost more than twenty dollars, but that wasn't an amount of money anyone in my family could just throw away either. Eventually I started trying to mend the broken bags and stitch together the fraying nylon before things completely fell apart, but that was only after murdering around a dozen backpacks with heavy textbooks and long walks home.

    Coming to Japan, I knew nothing of the school culture as it concerns bags. I was warned that kids usually have many after school activities and bags for each, but that was as far as I understood any of it.


My kid, my opposite, with her bag more expensive than my wedding dress.

    Imagine my shock when I first encountered the randoseru (ランドセル), a hard leather backpack children here are expected to use for the entirely of elementary school. The prices were what got my attention right off. The mid-range at Aeon then seemed to be around 60,000 yen then. $600? For a backpack?

    My Japanese husband did not understand my confusion. These items are ubiquitous and considered absolutely necessary. On the positive side, a recent search of Aeon's website led me to understand the current cheapest new option is only 28,000 yen. While that it's still three times the cost of all of my elementary school bags added together, the important thing is that there are options for some families on budgets despite the overall average cost of the randoseru increasing every year in the last decade.

    Recently, these expensive bags even showed up inexplicably in the Karate Kid spin-off, Kobra Kai, as a gift that Danny Russo brings back from Japan for his teenage daughter. Considering that the plot involved him having to fix a faulty business deal that was about to bankrupt him, I was stuck wondering what on earth would possess him to buy that as a souvenir for a teenager.

    Apparently, for those who enjoy anime or Japanese TV shows with characters in that age range, these things are special and so uniquely Japanese to be worth the expense. Others, including some American actresses, seem to think of it as any leather bag, theoretically fashionable.

    But why is something so connected to Japan only known by a katakana name? Where did that name come from anyway? As usual when confronted with an unfamiliar katakana word, I played around with the spellings and sounds until I confirmed that it could not be English. (Land-o-cell? What kind of phone is that?)

    As it turns out, according to wikipedia the word comes from German, specifically the word for soldier, landser, who traditionally carried a similar style of bag. Other sources instead state that the word came from a Dutch word for backpack, ransel. Either way, some European, military-style bag somehow became the only backpack for Japanese elementary school students and I can't be the only person wondering how that happened.

    Back in the 1800s, Japan was modernizing and instituting standard public school options around the country. Most kids at that point were carrying their materials to school in furoshiki cloths or simple bags, but then the crowned prince of Japan started elementary school. Two years earlier, an educational institute in Tokyo had banned their elite students from having their servants carry in their materials for them in an attempt to promote equality between social classes in school. The randoseru had been available at that time and people were encouraged to use them instead. While it isn't clear how well that caught on in Tokyo's upper class, when the little emperor-to-be started school, he did it with a randoseru on his back and others quickly followed suit. Within the metropolitan areas, ransoseru became common while kids in the countryside continued to use simpler and cheaper methods until the economic advancement of post-WWII Japan.

    While it might not be an actual rule in public schools, use of the randoseru is so expected that any kid without one stands out in a way that kids here tend not to want to do. Luckily, some areas have begun using recycling programs to give life to old, well maintained randoseru while saving kids from less fortunate families from the shame of going without.

    Would you use a randoseru as a handbag? If you have kids, do they use one?