TOKYO >> In Japan, cultural expectations are drilled into children at school and at home, with peer pressure playing as powerful a role as any authority or law. On the surface, at least, that can help Japanese society run smoothly.

During the pandemic, for example, the government never mandated masks or lockdowns, yet the majority of residents wore face coverings in public. Japanese tend to stand quietly in lines, obey traffic signals and clean up after themselves at public venues because they have been trained since kindergarten to do so.

Carrying the bulky randoseru to school is “not even a rule imposed by anyone but a rule that everyone is upholding together,” said Shoko Fukushima, associate professor of education administration at the Chiba Institute of Technology.

On the first day of school this spring — the Japanese school year starts in April — flocks of eager first graders and their parents arrived for an entrance ceremony at Kitasuna Elementary School in the Koto neighborhood of eastern Tokyo.

Seeking to capture an iconic moment mirrored across generations of Japanese family photo albums, the children, almost all of them carrying randoseru, lined up with their parents to pose for pictures in front of the school gate.

“An overwhelming majority of the children choose randoseru, and our generation used randoseru,” said Sarii Akimoto, whose son, Kotaro, 6, had selected a camel-colored backpack. “So we thought it would be nice.”

Traditionally, the uniformity was even more pronounced, with boys carrying black randoseru and girls carrying red ones. In recent years, growing discussion of diversity and individuality has prompted retailers to offer the backpacks in a rainbow of colors and with distinctive details such as embroidered cartoon characters, animals or flowers, or inside liners made from different fabrics.

Still, a majority of boys today carry black randoseru, although lavender has overtaken red in popularity among girls, according to the Randoseru Association. And aside from the color variations and an increased capacity to accommodate more textbooks and digital tablets, the shape and structure of the bags have remained remarkably consistent over decades.

The near totemic status of the randoseru dates back to the 19th century, during the Meiji era, when Japan transitioned from an isolated feudal kingdom to a modern nation navigating a new relationship with the outside world. The educational system helped unify a network of independent fiefs — with their own customs — into a single nation with a shared culture.

Schools inculcated the idea that “everyone is the same, everyone is family,” said Ittoku Tomano, an associate professor of philosophy and education at Kumamoto University.

In 1885, Gakushuin, a school that educates Japan’s imperial family, designated as its official school bag a hands-free model that resembled a military backpack from the Netherlands known as the ransel. From there, historians say, the randoseru quickly became Japan’s ubiquitous marker of childhood identity.

The military roots of the randoseru are in keeping with Japanese educational methods. Students learn to march in step with one another, drilling on the playground and in the classroom. The school system did not just help build a national identity; before and during World War II, it also prepared students for military mobilization.

After the war, the country mobilized again, this time to rebuild an economy with dutiful, compliant workers. In recognition of the strong solidarity symbolized by the randoseru, some large companies gave the backpacks as gifts to the children of its employees. It is a practice that continues today.

Grandparents often buy the randoseru as a commemorative gift. The leather versions can be quite expensive, with an average price of around 60,000 yen, or $380.

As a memento, some children choose to turn their used bags into wallets or cases for train passes once they graduate.

On a recent morning, Kotaro Akimoto, a first grader, left for school carrying a bag that weighed about 6 pounds, about one-seventh of his body weight. Walking the 10-minute route to school, he joined several other classmates and older students, all of whom were carrying a randoseru.

In Kotaro’s classroom, Megumi Omata, his teacher, had posted a diagram of morning tasks, with pictures to represent the order in which the students should proceed. An illustration of a randoseru indicated the stage of stowing school bags in cubbies for the day.

At the end of the day, Kaho Minami, 11, a sixth grader with a deep-red randoseru stitched with embroidered flowers that she had carried throughout elementary school, said she never yearned for any other kind of bag. “Because everyone wears a randoseru,” she said, “I think it is a good thing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company