On the Origins of Randoseru and the Once Proud Prussian Army

Since December, I've noticed little stations popping up in malls and shopping centers all over the place, selling what appear to be the exact same children's backpacks. What's surprising is not the plain-looking backpacks themselves but rather, their price tags, which range from $200 to upwards of $500 USD. My first thought was that there must be something incredibly advanced about them, like a built-in GPS system or some sort of tracking device. Under closer inspection, however, they appeared to be nothing more than plain-old backpacks. Well, in that case, no one must buy them, right? That's when I noticed that every single kid at my elementary schools has one.

As it turns out, these "backpacks" are actually called randoseru, a loan word based on the dutch ransel. Like many other aspects of the Japanese school system, randoseru traces it's roots back to 19th century European military practices:

It seems that the randoseru's origin can be traced back to the haino, a cloth knapsack for soldiers that was introduced-along with Western-style armies into Japan late in the Edo Period. A similar type of military bag was called ransel in Dutch, and these military satchels came to be called randoseru in Japan.

During the last great (internally-mandated) education reform initiative, which occurred shortly after the Meiji restoration of 1868, the Japanese national government attempted to modernize the school system using Europe as the blueprint. As per the trend in the West, new middle and high school uniforms were based on military designs; this was seen as a way to introduce military-style discipline into the classroom. Thus, boys were outfitted in the black uniform of the Prussian army and girls donned the sailor suit of the Royal British Navy. It was also around this time that the Dutch army ransel was adopted as the official backpack-black for boys and red for girls.

Anyone who's ever set foot in a Japanese school knows that unlike in Europe, most of these traditions haven't changed since the 19th century. Virtually all Japanese students still wear military uniforms and many middle and high schools still perform military-style drills in the mornings (exercise routines, standing and marching in formation, etc.). The randoseru persists to this day as well, although it has been passed down to elementary schoolers. Apparently, they became popular items for the younger crowd in the 1950s, during the early years of Japan's miraculous economic recovery. Nowadays, tradition holds that grandparents generally buy randoseru for new first graders-an act that symbolizes their entrance into the formal education system. Although the new school year doesn’t begin until April, randoseru booths are already reminding parents and grandparents of their obligatory investment.

That only leaves one question unanswered: why on earth are these things so damned expensive? The only answers I could turn up are that they're designed to last through all six years of elementary school and they're often made of real leather. While that's not really a sufficient explanation for why a backpack should cost $500, if I started getting into why things in Japan are so expensive in general, I could probably fill up a whole webpage.