As a child at an international school in Tokyo, my colleague Motoko Rich, now The Times’s Tokyo bureau chief, envied Japanese kids’ “supercool leather backpacks,” called randoseru — so much that, years later in Brooklyn, she bought one on eBay for her daughter.
When Motoko moved back to Japan as an adult, “randoseru were just part of the normal visual landscape” on streets and train platforms, she told me. “Rarely did I see an elementary child with any other kind of school bag,” she added. The backpacks are not required, but strong social norms lead most families to purchase them for their children.
It was only when a Korean journalist compared carrying the bag to hauling days’ worth of rations in a backpack during his army service that she thought of writing about the randoseru “as a microcosm of Japanese culture,” Motoko said. “This large burden carried by children, but also a representation of remarkable consistency and entrenched traditions.”
