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A look back on 40 years of Japanese schools banning stuff

Casey Baseel Feb 9, 2026
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Mr. Sato leads an office roundtable discussion on weird things Japanese schools have said “Nope, you can’t do that” about.

As we’ve touched on recently, Japan is currently in the grip of sticker fever, with people across the nation newly enthralled with collecting and exchanging cute little adhesive seals, especially the ones with some puffiness to them. While adults are not immune to sticker fever, it’s kids who feel the appeal most strongly, and as is so often the case when kids en masse find something they like, educators have stepped in to say “You can’t do that at school.”

With an increasing number of Japanese schools making it a rule that students aren’t allowed to have decorative stickers on campus, our ace reporter Mr. Sato found himself in a reflective mood, his mind drifting back to his days as a young tyke some 40-ish years ago, and the sort of restrictions and prohibitions that he’d had placed upon himself in school, At the time, the kids born in Japan’s bubble economy baby boom were flowing into the education system, and with class sizes increasing, teachers and administrators were no doubt concerned about maintaining order in the classroom. All the same, Mr. Sato still doesn’t understand why his middle school had to be so strict as to make it a rule that all boys had to shave their heads, and all girls had to conform to a set length of bangs. The teachers would even perform regular checks to make sure everyone’s hair was within the permissible lengths.

“Come to think of it,” said SoraNews24 owner Yoshio as Mr. Sato reminisced about his childhood, “when I was in middle school, we weren’t allowed to have a two-block hairstyle.” In Japan, “two-block” refers to an undercut, in which a man’s hair is shaved or cut short on the sides and at the back, but left long on top. Even today, it’s a hairstyle that some schools frown on, as it’s popular not just with fashionable young dudes, but also with delinquents, to the point that one Tokyo Board of Education member said that the hairstyle constituted a safety risk.

Moving to a closer parallel to the current trend of sticker bans, Mr. Sato recalled “The kids a little younger than me got into Bikkuriman [chocolate snacks that come with shiny stickers], and I heard the school banned those too. Even when I was going there, they wouldn’t let us use the erasers you could buy that looked like Kinnikuman [Muscle] anime characters or cars.”

“I mean, those are all technically stationery supplies, but they’re really more like toys, and so are the puffy stickers that’re having a boom right now,” chimed in fellow reporter P.K. Sanjun. “At my high school, they banned Walkmans. I still brought one, but I got caught and they took it away from me.”

“Well, yeah, they weren’t gonna let people bring those to school,” said Mr. Sato. “They didn’t have to take it away from you, though. And if you think about it, now that you can listen to music on your phone, everyone basically has a music player on them.”

“It wasn’t an item they banned,” said Seiji Nakazawa, the fourth member of our staff to jump into the conversation, “but at my elementary school, they had rules about what we were allowed to do on our way home. Most kids would walk home in groups, and sometimes they’d play rock-paper-scissors, and whoever lost had to carry everyone’s backpacks, so the school said they were going to start cracking down on things like that.”

“Ah, yeah, that happened at my school too,” remembered P.K., and Mr. Sato said the same. Yoshio’s experience had a wrinkle to it in that the loser only had to carry everyone’s stuff to the next telephone pole or some other partway-home distance, but in any case, it was a common practice, and so also a common target of school rules.

“We even had weird rules about what brands of drinks we were allowed to bring to school.” P.K. said. “Pocari Sweat [Japan’s biggest-selling sports drink] was OK, but [competing sports drink brand] Lifeguard was banned.”

▼ Lifeguard

“Ah, yeah, Gatorade was banned at my school,” Mr. Sato recalled, “but for some reason Pocari was OK…what was up with that?”

With uniforms being the norm at Japanese schools, you’d think that there wouldn’t be any need for apparel rules beyond “You have to wear the uniform,” but some students still got caught looking for wiggle room, sometimes literally. “In my high school, they had rules against altering your uniform so that the pants were extra-baggy or the coat was extra-long. I got there a little after that trend had already died down, though, so I couldn’t see why the heck anyone would want to do that anyway.”

“Ah, I’m a little older than you, so I was there when those were a thing,” explained Mr. Sato. “Stories about yankis [delinquents] like the manga Bebop High School and Roku de Nashi Blues were big, and people wanted to copy the style by altering their uniforms.”

▼ The sort of extra-baggy pants that were banned

Of course, with all of them now being full-grown men, and working in the lawless zone of SoraNews24 HQ, the quartet no longer has such unreasonable restrictions placed on their personal conduct and style. However, with Yoshio having two daughters who are currently in elementary school, he was able to confirm that schools still have some unusual rules, with some of the ones his daughters have to follow at theirs being:

● No using pencils or pencil cases with anime character illustrations on them
● No metallic pencil boxes that will make a loud noise if they fall to the floor
● No mechanical pencils
● Do pencil boxes that open from both sides
● No pencil cases with attached pencil sharpeners

▼ With its attached sharpener, this pencil box apparently has the power to shake the foundations of child education.

While it’s understandable that schools need certain rules to create a safe, constructive learning environment, it’s hard to see the logic behind some of the ones discussed above. But hey, at least they’ve been getting rid of underwear color requirements.

Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso, SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]