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Mr. Sato leads an office roundtable discussion on weird things Japanese schools have said \u201cNope, you can\u2019t do that\u201d about<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n As we\u2019ve touched on recently, Japan is currently in the grip of sticker fever<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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 \u201cYou can\u2019t do that at school.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n With an increasing number of Japanese schools making it a rule that students aren\u2019t allowed to have decorative stickers on campus, our ace reporter Mr. Sato<\/strong> 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\u2019d had placed upon himself in school, At the time, the kids born in Japan\u2019s 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\u2019t 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<\/strong>. The teachers would even perform regular checks to make sure everyone\u2019s hair was within the permissible lengths.<\/p>\n \u201cCome to think of it,\u201d<\/strong> said SoraNews24 owner Yoshio<\/strong> as Mr. Sato reminisced about his childhood, \u201cwhen I was in middle school, we weren\u2019t allowed to have a two-block hairstyle.\u201d<\/strong> In Japan, \u201ctwo-block\u201d refers to an undercut, in which a man\u2019s hair is shaved or cut short on the sides and at the back, but left long on top. Even today, it\u2019s a hairstyle that some schools frown on, as it\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Moving to a closer parallel to the current trend of sticker bans, Mr. Sato recalled \u201cThe kids a little younger than me got into Bikkuriman<\/strong><\/a> [chocolate snacks that come with shiny stickers], and I heard the school banned those too. Even when I was going there, they wouldn\u2019t let us use the erasers you could buy that looked like Kinnikuman [Muscle] anime characters or cars<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, those are all technically stationery supplies, but they\u2019re really more like toys, and so are the puffy stickers that\u2019re having a boom right now,\u201d chimed in fellow reporter P.K. Sanjun<\/strong>. \u201cAt my high school, they banned Walkmans. I still brought one, but I got caught and they took it away from me.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWell, yeah, they weren\u2019t gonna let people bring those to school,\u201d said Mr. Sato. \u201cThey didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t an item they banned,\u201d said Seiji Nakazawa<\/strong>, the fourth member of our staff to jump into the conversation, \u201cbut 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\u2019d play rock-paper-scissors, and whoever lost had to carry everyone\u2019s backpacks, so the school said they were going to start cracking down on things like that<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAh, yeah, that happened at my school too,\u201d remembered P.K., and Mr. Sato said the same. Yoshio\u2019s experience had a wrinkle to it in that the loser only had to carry everyone\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe even had weird rules about what brands of drinks we were allowed to bring to school.\u201d<\/strong> P.K. said. \u201cPocari Sweat [Japan\u2019s biggest-selling sports drink] was OK, but [competing sports drink brand] Lifeguard was banned.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n \u25bc Lifeguard<\/p>\n \u201cAh, yeah, Gatorade was banned at my school,\u201d<\/strong> Mr. Sato recalled, \u201cbut for some reason Pocari was OK\u2026what was up with that?\u201d<\/p>\n With uniforms being the norm at Japanese schools, you\u2019d think that there wouldn\u2019t be any need for apparel rules beyond \u201cYou have to wear the uniform,\u201d but some students still got caught looking for wiggle room, sometimes literally. \u201cIn my high school, they had rules against altering your uniform so that the pants were extra-baggy or the coat was extra-long<\/strong>. I got there a little after that trend had already died down, though, so I couldn\u2019t see why the heck anyone would want to do that anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAh, I\u2019m a little older than you, so I was there when those were a thing,\u201d explained Mr. Sato. \u201cStories about yankis [delinquents] like the manga Bebop High School<\/em> and Roku de Nashi Blues<\/em> were big, and people wanted to copy the style by altering their uniforms.\u201d<\/p>\n \u25bc The sort of extra-baggy pants that were banned<\/p>\n 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:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u25cf No using pencils or pencil cases with anime character illustrations on them \u25bc With its attached sharpener, this pencil box apparently has the power to shake the foundations of child education.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s understandable that schools need certain rules to create a safe, constructive learning environment, it\u2019s hard to see the logic behind some of the ones discussed above. But hey, at least they\u2019ve been getting rid of underwear color requirements<\/a>.<\/p>\n Top image: Pakutaso<\/a><\/em> Mr. Sato leads an office roundtable discussion on weird things Japanese schools have said \u201cNope, you can\u2019t do that\u201d about. As we\u2019ve touched on recently, Japan is currently in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soranews24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2026\/02\/sr-5.jpg?w=640\")
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\n\u25cf No metallic pencil boxes that will make a loud noise if they fall to the floor
\n\u25cf No mechanical pencils
\n\u25cf Do pencil boxes that open from both sides
\n\u25cf No pencil cases with attached pencil sharpeners<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soranews24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2026\/02\/sr-4.jpg?w=640\")
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\nInsert images: Pakutaso<\/a>, SoraNews24<\/em>
\n\u25cf Want to hear about SoraNews24\u2019s latest articles as soon as they\u2019re published? Follow us on Facebook<\/a> and Twitter<\/a>!<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"