I found Japanese shopping bags are beautiful. Some of them are elegant and some are cute. So I cannot resist from collecting them. But I don’t want to use them because they look nice and I end up finding my closet full of them. This is a bad habit maybe but I just love to see creative bags. Well, I even keep shopping bags of Trader Joe’s, Wholefoods and Barnes & Nobles so maybe I just like to keep collecting things. Anyway, even so, it may be interesting to see the designs of Japanese shopping bags so I will show them to you.
Shopping Bag of Traditional Shops
Traditional shops have shopping bags of traditional designs. For example this is a bag of a chopstick shop in Asakusa. The design has a Japanese taste but it uses English letters so that oversea visitors can also understand.

Chopstick Shop in Asakusa “Mansaku”
Another interesting design is a bag of Japanese sweets shop “Azabu Karinto”.

Azabu Karinto, Japanese Snack Shop
The blake thick line is a shape of “karinto” which is sweet and deep-fried and is made of flour, yeast and brown sugar. You can see if you look at the photo of real karinto🙂
Shopping Bags of Sweets Shop
Japanese traditional sweets shop often have beautiful souvenir bags. For example, see the bag of Kikyo-ya. Kikyo-ya is a shop of Yamanashi prefecture.
This is a shopping bag of Fukuju-do in Ningyo-cho, Tokyo. Ningyo-cho is a town near from Nihombashi and has many traditional shops and a historic shopping street.
Kogane Imo is made of sweet potatoes with lots of cinnamon inside. The yellow shopping bag has a retrospective taste. And so does the package of Kogane Imo.
Many More Designs
Here are a collection of photos of shopping bags. Since there are wide variety of design, It is like looking at the exhibition or something.
Shopping Bags of American Shops
Here are bonus photos. They are the bags of international brand (or maybe American brand, to be precise). They have their own original taste, I think. But I wonder if they use the same design back in the States. Does anyone know?
Yes, indeed beautiful. Have You thought that You can make Your own shopping bags. It is very popular in Finland to make them, because we are coffee drinkers we use empty coffee bags, but of course You could use tea bag, if You are tea drinker. Here two my posts in which my wife shows how to steps by steps.
How to make bags from empty coffee bags
How to make evening bag from empty coffee bags
Have a wonderful day!
Thank you, Sartenada. Those bags are very original and unique! I want to make them myself, too. They are very beautiful.
Thanks, it’s very informative
I like the article
Thank you very much, Carl.