Randoseru · ランドセル
The year red stopped being a girl’s colour.
For most of the post-war era a Japanese six-year-old’s randoseru — the stiff leather satchel they carry for all six years of elementary school — came in two colours: red for girls, black for boys. Nine years of purchase surveys read like a social climate record: the binary loosening, one spring at a time.
- 紫purple
- 桃pink
- 水色light blue
- 赤red
- 茶brown
- 黒black
- 紺navy
- 青blue
- 緑green
- 他other
How to read it
Each column is one spring’s incoming first-graders, split by the colour their family bought. Girls sit above the centre line, boys below; within a column the slices stack in the same colour order every year, so each colour keeps its band and you can follow it left to right. The muted grey band is everything outside the top five.
On the girls’ side, red, the colour synonymous with Japanese schoolgirls for seventy years, was still number one at 25% in 2019. By 2026 it had fallen to fifth, under 7%, overtaken even by light brown, while purple climbed to about 30%. On the boys’ side the change is slower: black peaked at a 70% supermajority in 2020 and has drifted down to 54%, with navy, blue and green taking the difference.
By the numbers
Why a ~¥62,034 bag for a six-year-old? A shrinking birthrate leaves two parents and four grandparents per child, and grandparents foot the bill about 54% of the time. The same pressure shows up in the satchel’s weight: school textbooks grew 75% in total pages between 2005 and 2020 after Japan ended its “yutori” curriculum.
A ¥12 satchel in 1945; ¥45,000 by 2015 (government retail survey): a different metric from today’s ¥62,034 purchase average, but the same one-way climb.
How the data works
Figures are the Randoseru Industrial Association’s annual purchase survey (about 1,500 parents each February, 2018–2026), reported as each year’s top five colours per gender, so a column shows those five, not the full palette, and the grey band holds the remaining ~10–13%. The two browns (こげ茶 / うす茶) are drawn as one lane; which shade leads shifts mid-series. The 2026 figures come from the association’s press release rather than its chart images.
Source & method
Randoseru Industrial Association, “Survey on Randoseru Purchases,” 2018–2026 (fieldwork by Cross Marketing, n≈1,500/year). Modern price from the same survey; long-run retail price from the government Retail Price Survey. Weight and textbook pages from the Footmark survey and the Japan Textbook Association.
Words for the satchel
The whole story is a story about colour words: the ones a six-year-old picks, and the ones their grandparents grew up calling “the girl colour” and “the boy colour.” Tap to hear each one.
- ランドセルrandoseruthe leather school satchel carried for all six years
- 入学nyugakuentering school
- 赤akared — the colour that was once every girl's default
- 黒kuroblack — still the boys' standard, but slipping
- 紺konnavy
- 紫murasakipurple — the new most-popular colour for girls
- 水色mizuirolight blue
- 桃色momoiropink
- 茶色chairobrown
- 緑midorigreen
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