Sailor Fuku

Everyone looks good in a Sailor Fuku. Even mechas.

Take it! I'm supposed to be the one who laughs last Because of my sailor uniform, that's the conclusion I'm in a bad mood, what to do? Even though it's Monday! Summer clothes'll fix it — Cuuute! —Lucky Star opening theme (okay, it sounds better in Japanese, but...)

The Sailor Fuku is to the characteristic "sailor suit" schoolgirl uniforms worn in Japan. Sailor fuku uniforms are actually based on late 1800s early/1900s "rational dress" girl's fashions (themselves based on European naval uniforms), which progressed into the "middy" dress that was seen in the west till at least the 1920s with Sears offering over dozens of variants, both as one piece and separate tops, for children, teenagers, and even some for adult women and even some articles appearing in the 1941 Montgomery Ward Catalog. Despite their western history, the prevalence of sailor-suited school girls in anime, manga, and other forms of Japanese media show how iconic the sailor fuku is in Japan. This is true despite many Japanese schools having switched to more Western-patterned uniforms. However, there are some American schools that use Sailor Fuku.

Sailor-suit uniforms may be a vehicle for Fan Service as well, as the uniform skirts are often depicted as being unrealistically short. This alteration is so common that it is rarely commented on or questioned, though it may be off-putting to those who are not used to anime or manga based media. Uniforms may be altered in other ways to distinguish certain characters, especially ones considered particularly beautiful.

This is more a Japanese cultural trope than an Anime Trope but is found prominently in anime, especially on Joshikousei; compare the Western trope Catholic Schoool Girls Rule.

It may depend on the region, but in Real Life as of the early 21st century the sailor suit (and the traditional male counterpart, the gakuran) has become largely the domain of middle/junior high schools, whereas high schools have shifted towards more fashionable or professional-looking styles of uniform, often with tailored blazers, vests, neckties, and plaid skirts. Elementary schools, if they have a uniform, tend towards collarless jackets and skirts with suspenders—and sometimes, students wear their gym uniforms during class and change into their formal uniforms when outside of the school or attending ceremonies.

In an inversion of a western trope, in the 70s and late 80s, the common image of a female delinquent had an extremely long skirt, but this appears less frequently these days..

See School Swimsuit for another type of Japanese uniform often used to a similar effect in media.

Compare School Uniforms Are the New Black, since some examples here have the uniform as their standard outfit.

Examples of Sailor Fuku include:

Anime and Manga

• Though the central female characters of Sailor Moon are actually junior high-schoolers, not only do they all wear sailor uniforms in their "civilian" lives, their Senshi uniforms seem to be clearly based on them as well; indeed, this is where the "Sailor" in the name comes from. This is later justified when it is revealed that the sailor-suit concept comes from ancestral memories of the heroes' uniform, not vice-versa.
• In Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daishou, Mankichi Togawa wears a modified gakuran that has an open jacket with rolled-up sleeves. He also wears geta sandals rather than normal shoes.
  • Mankichi attends a middle school in a small village, which has gakuran for guys and fukus for girls.
  • Though Mankichi's love interest Tomoko Okano wears a fuku in the anime OP, in the manga she's seen wearing what seems to be a Western blazer uniform in chapter 5.
• Toune in Melody of Oblivion, who goes around fighting Monsters wearing sailor fuku.
• Kagome Higurashi in Inuyasha wears her school uniform while hunting monsters in the sengoku period, centuries before they were invented. She's a time traveler from the present day and Word of God says—tongue planted firmly in cheek—that she prefers it because it's durable. At the very end, however, she averts it via attending a highschool that has blazers. A few later, her now middle-school aged brother Souta shows up in a gakuran.
  • Stable Time Loop! Her legendary exploits in the past inspired the invention of the fuku.
  • On the other hand, a number of minor characters in the Sengoku Period refer to her "that strangely and scantily clad woman" as a result.
• Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch
• Misaki of Angelic Layer wears her uniform to play Angelic Layer, as do a few other characters.
• .hack//:
  • In Tasogare no Udewa Densetsu, one of the fetished-up outfits that Shugo discovers in a treasure chest is a sailor fuku.
  • The character designer for the .hack//Another Birth novels has mentioned considering giving Akira a sailor fuku in the real world, but decided against it as they were overused, and gave her a less common blazer uniform.
• Ouran High School Host Club:
  • Haruhi, the local wholesome female cross-dresser, infiltrates an elementary school with a 17-year old male classmate named Honey. Honey dresses in his old elementary school uniform while Haruhi puts on her middle school sailor fuku. The rest of the club admits that the two stick out anyway so the disguises are useless: they just wanted to see Haruhi in a schoolgirl's uniform.
  • Haruhi's middle school uniform shows up again in the Alice in Wonderland inspired All Just a Dream episode.
  • The Ouran Academy has a more elaborate get-up for female students (which look a bit like Gothic Lolita uniforms), but that doesn't stop Renge from occasionally cosplaying her favourite Visual Novel's heroine in fuku.
  • St. Lobelia has fuku uniforms, which actually resemble long skirts.
• Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei - save for Kaede/Kaere, everyone wears fuku or gakuran.
• Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash Star and Heartcatch Pretty Cure both have their respective heroines wear sailor suit-esque school uniforms (although the ones in Heartcatch are dress uniforms, they're still sailor suit-esque nonetheless). Miki's school uniform in Fresh Pretty Cure can also be considered an example.
• Suzumiya Haruhi revolves around a high-school club, and thus, sailor fuku appear in abundance. In Volume 1 of the novels, Kyon wonders if the principal has a fetish for this since male students wear blazers and ties, but girls wear the more traditional sailor uniform.
  • Another school in the series, Kouyouen School, has gakuran for the boys and Western blazers for the girls. It's the school attended by Kuyo Suou in canon, and by Haruhi and Itsuki in the Alternate Universe from Disappearance.
• Lucky Star's Anime Theme Song is titled "Motteke! Sailor Fuku". The CD has a B-side titled "Kaeshite! Knee Socks".
• Digimon: Sora wears a green one in Digimon Adventure 02, since she's now attending junior high. The boys, however, have Western blazers.
  • Ruki wears a Western blazer uniform in Digimon Tamers, though she always changes out as soon as she gets home.
  • Miyako/Yolei gets her green seifuku in the third movie - and wonders whether she can wear her cargo pants under the skirt.
  • In Tri, Hikari gets her own green fuku. Almost everyone else in junior high/highschool wears a blazer uniform; the other exception is the new cast member Meiko Mochizuki.
• Mahou Sensei Negima, though only to point out that the fact Sayo wears one is proof that she died a long time ago as the uniform has changed since. The school itself now has Western blazers for the students.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha also based her battle uniform on a sailor fuku, although her young incarnation has a considerably longer skirt than normal.
  • This seems to be the uniform at the Mid-Childian school Harii Tribeccah goes to in Vi Vid.
• Kimura in Azumanga Daioh suggests sailor uniforms as a gym outfit.
  • Chiyo's two friends from elementary school wear these upon entering middle school. Chiyo's somewhat jealous that she'll never get to wear one because she skipped ahead to high school, but they note that they are not likely get into her school.
• Full Metal Panic Fumoffu: A delightful sequence occurs where Kaname Chidori, normally dressed in the school's fairly unusual outfit, agrees to become "manager" for a rugby club: and so puts on a more traditional sailor fuku (and carries a kettle).
  • When Commander Mardukas has just threatened Sousuke with terrible retribution should he do anything indecent to Tessa while she is staying in Japan, when the girl in question enters wearing a Jindai High School uniform. Cue open-mouthed response from both males, until Tessa asks what they're staring at.
• Hitomi from Vision of Escaflowne wears her school uniform for most of the series, even though she's been transported to another world where Japanese high schools are not present. In one episode, she's given a local dress to wear, only to rip off the skirt so that she can run freely later. Interestingly, the dress rips completely cleanly and evenly, leaving her with an outfit that looks amazingly similar to her school uniform. And even more interestingly, said uniform may be a Western one, but the jacket's collar and scaef heavily resemble a sailor fuku's.
• In one episode of Bottle Fairy, the fairies, while imagining going to school, are all in sailor fuku... except for Cloudcuckoolander Hororo, who dresses up in the equivalent iconic uniform for kindergarten and elementary school. The others get her straightened out by the time "class" starts, though.
• The manga version of Read or Die included this when parodying (but using) Fan Service moments, with Yomiko donning one of the much younger Nenene's fuku. It's even lampshaded.

Yomiko: Even though I'm 25, it looks good, right?

• A variant of the standard sailor uniform as a one-piece dress somehow winds up in the thrift store in Haibane Renmei, where Rakka buys it and wears it for the majority of the series.
• Love Hina, the younger tenants are occasionally seen in them, and Kitsune and Naru are prominently seen in flashbacks...and, occasionally, not in flashbacks.
• The sailor fuku's worn in Mariasama ga Miteru are an interesting variety, in that they have very long skirts and are generally not very flattering. In that, they may actually be more like the real thing.
  • Also notable in that they appear to be one-piece dresses, as opposed to the typical separate blouse and skirt.
• Nobel Gundam from G Gundam is a Humongous Mecha dressed in a Sailor Fuku. As if that weren't nonsensical enough, it's from Sweden of all places. Presumably the scientists who designed it were a bunch of weeaboos (it does show its Scandinavian roots in another way, though...).
  • Similarly the VF-1A "Angel Bird" variant Valkyrie from the first episode of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Though it never transforms out of fighter mode on-screen, the paint scheme becomes oddly familiar in Battroid mode. One of the many such Easter Eggs thrown into the first few episodes of the series.
• The sailor uniforms in Saki appear to have quite some variation in skirt lengths, ranging from way below the knees to ultra-short, permanently flashy miniskirts—the latter usually reserved for younger characters, sometimes combined with Zettai Ryouiki.
• Aoi Hana: The all-girl high school attended by Akira, Fujigaya, has relatively realistically depicted sailor fukus, with skirts way below the knee.
• Takane Katsu in Burst Angel wears this, wields a sword, and drives a motorcycle. And she's a police officer who snags Jo's arm with a thrown cuff on a chain. Strong candidate for Fetish Fuel Station Attendant?
• While the tops of Hayate the Combat Butler's Hakuou Academy have resemblance to the style, the skirts are ankle length. Isumi still dislikes them for being 'breezy', though she wears kimonos.
• Hanaukyo Maid Tai La Verite episode 8. When Konoe doesn't have any civilian clothes to wear, her assistant Yashima Sana dresses her in one of these and then puts on one herself. They look like a cross between a normal Japanese School Uniform and a Catholic school uniform.
• Cherry Juice: Haruka Fukushima, author of the shojo manga, admits in the omake that one of the main reasons she decided to make a high-school romance series was so that she would have the opportunity to draw Sailor Fuku.
• Kochikame: Special Detectives Moonlight and Venus are male variants of Sailor Fuku who make their role in fighting crime using old fighter jets and made appearances in every TV special.
• Bleach: The high school attended by the lead character has gray gakuran for the boys and gray Western blazers for the girls and thus it was not seen for most of the early manga. This makes the appearance of Lisa Yadomaru, a woman likely in her twenties, wearing the fuku a little jarring.
  • Following the first Time Skip, Ichigo's sisters Yuzu and Karin wear white and blue fukus on entering middle school. The flashbacks to their brother, Orihime, Tatsuki, Chad, Keigo and Mizuiro's middle school years also have the boys in normal black gakurans and the girls in fukus.
  • The Whole-Episode Flashback from the last arc shows that Karakura High had fukus for the girls and blazers for the boys around 20-25 years ago, however. Of special note is a highschool girl who fights Hollows while wearing a dark fuku with no scarf and a VERY short skirt: It's Masaki, the woman who'd become the mother or Ichigo and his sisters.
• An omake of Naruto featured a high school with these uniforms... but he associated fetishism was interrupted when said fukus were worn by Orochimaru and Kabuto. The omakes got upgraded to vomics (Voiced Comics) that are basically a High School AU, and the kids from the Konoha High School still wore fukus and gakurans.
• Nitori from Wandering Son owns one despite her school not using them.
  • When the True Companions split off into various high schools Sasa, Momoko and Chizuru got put in schools that have Sailor Fuku. The Nitori sisters, Makoto and Riku go to schools that have the contemporary "blazer" style uniforms, while Takatsuki and Saori got into schools that are uniform-free. Nevertheless, Nitori got a new girls uniform.
  • When the trans woman and local Cool Big Sis Yuki Yoshida was a teen, one of the Stock Shoujo Bullying Tactics that she was subjected to included being forced to wear a fuku while her classmates laughed at her.
• The antromorphized Sealand in Axis Powers Hetalia always wears a sailor suit.
  • In the Gakuen Hetalia sketches, everyone wears Western uniforms - but some sketches have Taiwan and Vietnam wearing fuku.
  • The chibi sketches about Japanese prefectures have some clad in what seems to be gakuran and fuku (like Aomori, Akita, Fukui, Ehime, Saga, etc.) and others in clothes that resemble Western uniforms (Saitama, Hyogo, Kagoshima, etc.).
• Yoshiko Tomonaga in Sisterism wears one in a chapter.
• A oneshot in Robot: Super Color Comic takes place in The Future where Sailor Fuku are no longer used however the protagonists of the chapter wear them while going to a picnic. They try to cosplay as 21st century girls, eating food from that period (crepes) and going down to the long-since evacuated areas below ground.
• Parodied along with just about every other anime trope in Martian Successor Nadesico. Impractically short-skirted sailor fuku feature prominently in the titular space battleship's "Early 21st Century High School" virtual reality entertainment program and one character trying to seduce another hacks the program to make her skirt even shorter.
• In Millennium Actress Chiyoko is often shown wearing a sailor fuku in the scenes depicting her childhood: unlike modern versions it's a genuine 1930s-era winter uniform made out of heavy wool for durability and cut with "room to grow" bagginess.
• Tokyo Babylon and X 1999:
  • A very important scene in TB involves a teenage boy in a gakuran. The teen is Seishirou: he was in highschool when he first met a little Subaru. Especially notorious because almost every other student in the series wears a Western uniform.
  • In X the movie, Kamui and Fuuma show up in gakuran while Arashi has a white and brown seifuku and both Shougo and Yuzuriha have Western uniforms.
  • In the X manga and TV series the school attended by Kamui and the Monou siblings has the same gakuran from the movie, plus blazer uniforms for the girls. Yuzuriha and Arashi also show up in their original uniforms. Few later, however, the girls plus Sorata and Kamui attend CLAMP Campus school, which has Western blazers for boys and dress-like uniforms with puffy short sleeves and flowing skirts for the girls.
• Wearing fuku in Taishou Yakyuu Musume is a big deal, as the series takes place in the Imperial Japan of The Roaring Twenties - aka the time the fuku was introduced. The Tohou Seika Academy has white and blue fukus as its uniform but it still allows girls to use hakama; Nao, Tamaki and Koume wear hakama rather than fuku, but Koume really wants her fuku even when her very traditional parents won't let her use it.
• Kyou Kara Yonshimai has Sakura Manabe and her boyfriend Uozumi going to a high school that has fuku and gakuran for the students.
• Fruits Basket and its sequel, Fruits Basket Another, gives Kaibara High students blue fukus with super short Magic Skirts and blue gakuran for the boys.
  • Kisa and Rin attend other schools which have white fukus.
  • When Hiro starts attending junior-high, he goes to one with gakuran.
• The Brave Express Might Gaine: Maito Senpuuji and his best friend/mechanic Mitsuhiko Hamada attend a school with gakuran and fuku for the kids, while Maito's girlfriend Sally goes to another with similar uniforms and is often seen in her white and blue fuku.
• Fushigi Yuugi averts the trope at the beginning since Miaka Yuuki and Yui Hongo's junior high uses Western blazers and so does their highschool. In Genbu Kaiden it's averted again as Takiko Okuda, who's from the Imperial Japan of The Roaring Twenties, wears hakama to school (though autor's notes say she did use fuku when she lived in Tokyo)... but in Byakko Senki it's played completely straight since Suzuno Osugi, who comes from the Imperial Japan of the 30's, goes to an all-girls school with traditional fukus and her school-aged adoptive brothers are seen in gakuran.
• Sakura Gari takes place around 1923, and while the highschool-aged Masataka wears hakama to school and when at work, some of his classmates wear gakuran instead.
  • The flashbacks to Souma Saiki's Dark and Troubled Past sometimes show his pre-teen self in a fuku-like outfit.
• In Tasogare Otome X Amnesia, the Cute Ghost Girl Yuuko (who died 60 years ago) wears an old fashioned fuku with a very long skirt and tights. Momoe, Kirie and other schoolgirls from present times wear more modern versions with shorter skirts, while Teiichi and other male students wear black gakuran.
• Averted in Another, as Kouichi and Mei's high school has always used Western uniforms. Even the flashbacks to past Calamities feature the kids dressing like this, though in these years the girls had longer skirts.
• In Mirai Nikki, Yukki and Yuno's middle school is uniform free, but some flashbacks in the anime show that Ai and Marco's high school had gakuran and fukus. Ai's rapists, however, wore Western uniforms.
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the school uniforms used by the cast and their classmates tend to be more Western-inspired, though the girls' own seem to be inspired by fukus.
  • At some point, Shinji's taking a ride in the subway and two girls in traditional fukus are around him.
• Masaki and Saaya's middle school from Ice Revolution has fukus for the girls and gakurans for the boys. Masaki, being the local Tomboy and a first year student, is introduced wearing her brother's gakuran at first since her own fuku hasn't been delivered yet.
• Subverted in Attacker You!. You Hazuki is wearing a black and white fuku in the first episode... because, not unlike in Masaki's case, she's just arrived at her school (in her case she's the New Transfer Student) and her own uniform hasn't been delivered. She soon wears a Western blazer like her teammates / classmates, though her Love Interest Shou and the boys from the school use gakuran.
• In the Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba High School AU, Kimetsu Gakuen, the middle school-aged girls like Makomo and Nezuko use dark blue fukus with red scarves rather than the Western uniforms that highschoolers like Kanao, Aoi and Shinobu wear. Same to middle-school boys like Muichiro and his twin brother Yuuichirou, who wear black gakurans.
• The trope was firmly averted in Saint Seiya, with the closest to an example of Joshikousei being Saori's Western uniform from the Legend of the Sanctuary CG movie... until the Saintia Sho Spin-Off began. There, Saori aka Athena is not only the Barrier Maiden and Big Good but the Student Council President of a local all-girls school, which has white and light blue fukus as its uniform.
• U.A. High School and other schools in the My Hero Academia world tend to have blazers for boys and girls, while the middle school that Izuku and Katsuki used to attend (Aldera Junior High) had gakuran.
  • A flashback to the Todoroki family's shared Dark and Troubled Past has Shouto's then-teenaged older sister Fuyumi wearing a blue fuku.
  • The other big hero school in Japan, Shiketsu High School, has gakuran for the boys and gakuran-like tops plus pleated skirts for girls. And Nice Hats for everyone!
  • In her youth, Kaina Tsutsumi aka Lady Nagant was shown in a white and blue fuku (plus a green scarf).
  • Himiko Touga from the League of Villains wears hers as her fighting clothes, apparently because she believes that wearing a school uniform will help her blend in better.
• Jujutsu Kaisen:
  • The uniforms of Tokyo Prefectural Jujutsu High School aka Jujutsu High are rather customizable, but tend to be based on gakurans. ie, Megumi uses a gakuran close to normal ones, Yuuji customized his with a hoodie, Yuuta's own uniform has a white jacket, and both Maki and Nobara wear gakuran-like tops with short skirts and tights.
  • In the Gojo's past arc the younger Satoru Gojo, Shouko Ieiri, Kento Nanami, Yuu Haibara and Suguru Geto wore Jujutsu High uniforms with their own spins too (ie, Shoko used a miniskirt, Geto favored baggy pants, Yuu's top was shorter and open plus he wore a white shirt underneath). However, Gojo and Geto's protegée Riko Amanai attended another school (Renchoku Girls' Junior High) and wore its white and blue seifuku.
  • Mimiko and Nanako Hasaba, Geto's protegées whom he rescued from cruel non-Sorcerers as little girls, wore seifuku - Mimiko's was a traditional dark blue fuku, Nanako's was a white and blue one with a Magic Skirt.
  • Saki Rindou from the Phantom Parade game wears a blue fuku with a belly-baring shirt and a super long skirt.
  • The Idol Singer Nobuko Takada wears a fuku as well.
  • Yuuji, Megumi and Yuuta used to attend to schools that used Western uniforms.
• In the first Barefoot Gen movie, which is set in the days of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gen's teenage sister Eiko is seen wearing a white and blue traditional one.
• In Candy Candy, Candy's English Boarding School has one-piece uniforms for its female students that follow the "rational dress" code, but in practice look a LOT like fukus. It shouild be noticed that in the manga, the skirts are noticeably longer than in the anime.
  • Also, the dress code dictates that the girls must wear white uniform dresses in week days and black ones in the weekends. Candy didn't know this when she transferred and showed up in a white uniform in Sunday, which got her mocked by Eliza and other students.
• In Mahou no Mako-chan, the titular Magical Girl Mako Urashima attends an uniform free school, but her best friend Haruko Hayashi wears an blue fuku and the local tough boy Banchou Matsubashi has a modified gakuran

Film

• The live-action adaptation of Blood: The Last Vampire has finally brought this fetish to the silver screen.
• Emily Browning's character in Sucker Punch appears to do this.
• In Two Brothers Raoul, a French boy in 1920's French Indochina, wears the Western sailor suit fashion that became the basis for the use of sailor suits as school uniforms in Japan.
• Featured prominently in Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (as the title indicates), a film about an Ordinary High School Student who inherits the leadership of a Yakuza clan.
• Almost Angels depicts the Real Life sailor suit uniform of the Vienna Boys Choir. Needless to say there are several variations from the Japanese school girl model, most notably the use of trousers instead of skirts.
• Gogo Yubari from Kill Bill wears a Western uniform as explicit Fetish Fuel. Her fetish is gutting men who think she's trying to appeal to their fetish.
  • In flashbacks, a pre-teen O-Ren is seen in a sailor suit uniform as she kills Boss Matsumoto to avenge her parents, whom he murdered

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider Kabuto: Tendou Juka, Tendou Souji's little sister, is a prime example. Some consider her an example of Lolicon pandering.
• Surprisingly, Star Trek: The Original Series. In the episode "Court Martial", a young girl is wearing a futuristic sailor fuku. Humorously enough, it looks like something Sailor Mercury would wear.

Music

• Chibi from The Birthday Massacre wears a sailor suit in the video for "Looking Glass".

Video Games

• AIR is not set in a high school, but all the girls wear their uniforms almost all the time.
• Yoake Mae Yori Ruriiro na gives sailor uniforms to about half the haremettes; in an odd twist, poster girl Feena is among those that do not.
• Sakura and Karin from the Street Fighter series both dress in sailor fuku. It's so much a part of who Sakura is, that she wears it as her fight uniform in Street Fighter IV, despite Word of God stating that she's over twenty now.
  • They both drop the fukus as main outfits in V, though Karin's clothes are fairly similar. Also, Sakura can get her fuku back as a DLC outfut.
• Guilty Gear: The Jellyfish Pirates wear sailorfuku tops and pants as their uniform.
  • In Xrd, Ramlethal Valentine gains a green and white fuku as her civilian clothes after her Heel Face Turn. At the very end, her sister Elphelt gets an identical one but in red and white.
• Hinata Wakaba and the other girls in Rival Schools tend to avert it with Western blazers, but Yurika wears a fuku-like dress.
  • Zaki and her gang wear fukus, as it befits female Japanese Delinquents.
• Athena Asamiya from Psycho Soldier. Her King of Fighters incarnation was suppossed to fight in a sailor fuku but the creators thought that it would be "too risqué", and limited the outfit to her pre-fight animations. Years later, she actually fought in such outfit in SNK vs Capcom (Neo Geo Pocket version); and finally, from The King of Fighters XI onwards she actually fights using a school uniform... as late as it may seem.
• Kasumi and Ayane from Dead or Alive have, in some games, alternate outfits that are school outfits, all for Fan Service purposes, of course, but also note that they're supposed to be that young.
• Saki from the Oneechanbara series has a sailor suit as her default outfit.
• Ling Xiaoyu and her Palette Swap Miharu Hirano from the Tekken series can wear the Mishima Polytechnical School's uniform, which is basically a Western outfit with a fuku like collar.
  • Jin could wear the boys' version of the school's uniform in 3 and Tag Tournament 1.
  • Asuka averts this: she's highschool aged, but wears a Western blazer uniform.
• In the standard branch of the Tokimeki Memorial series (aka Tokimeki Memorial 1 to 4), actually only the first game has a Sailor Fuku as the High School's uniform, the other three using Blazers. When Tokimeki Memorial 4, set in the same High School (Kirameki High) as the first game fifteen years later, was announced, some fans cried They Changed It, Now It Sucks regarding the change of the school's iconic Sailor Fuku to a Balzer-type uniform : the complain fortunately dried down quickly, thanks to Konami's clever move of making Kirameki High change gradually its uniform, so that the two senpai characters keep the Sailor Fuku as the last class wearing it, while the main protagonist and the characters in the same year as him and below christen the new Blazer.
• Arguably subverted in the Touhou series. Despite having an Fundamentally Female Cast with hundreds of characters:
  • the only character who's canonically a schoolgirl never wears a uniform,
  • only two of the characters have been officially depicted wearing a sailor outfit,
  • both of those characters' outfits featured shorts or culottes instead of a skirt, and
  • one of them gets a free pass on account of actually being a sailor.
• In Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, the strongest and most expensive clothes that can be purchased that playable (though the NPCs can be sold it as well, obviously) female characters can equip and be sold is a sailor uniform, whose description reads "Confers great power upon women of any age group." Though if male characters come in asking for clothes, you can sell them this also (though the playable male characters cannot equip it, which would make it funnier).
• In The World Ends With You, a sailor uniform and gakuran can be found as special clothes.
• In Kisetsu o Dakishimete (the 2nd game of the Yarudora series), the school blazer Mayu wears when the player character first finds her is a plot point. At several moments of the storyline, they use it to try and find the school it's affiliated to, and consequently discover Mayu's identity. It doesn't work, nobody they ask has ever seen this blazer. When following the "Spirit of the Cherry Trees" storyline, it's implied the blazer is the one Mayu's sister Mami, who just came back from overseas, wore when she was in an accident.
• In Valis, Yuko Ahso wears a sailor fuku for the first few stages before going Stripperiffic. The blue skirt matches the color of her hair. It returns in Valis II as one of her selectable outfits.
• In the Fushigi Yuugi Dating Sims, the trope is zigzagged:
  • The Player Character of the Genbu Kaiden-based game Kagami no Miko, Mariko Kobayashi, and her possible Love Interest Takumi Mochizuki use Western uniforms.
  • The PC of the original story-based Suzaku Ibun, Madoka Ohtori, is a Miaka Expy who wears a Western uniform... with a red collar that looks exactly like that of a fuku. Her best friend and Yui Expy Misaki Himuro wears a similar one, but with a blue collar.

Web Comics

• In El Goonish Shive, Grace pictures herself and most other female characters wearing fuku in her school-related Dream Sequence. This is probably meant to imply that her impression of school up until that point came almost entirely from watching anime. Judging by the design, it's specifically Azumanga Daioh.
• The heroine of MAQ #41 used to wear Japanese uniforms to school. Since she lives in the United States this was viewed as quite odd and helped make her a target for bullying.
• The Wotch: The spell used to turn Professor Sorgaz into MingMei Wu was allegedly created by a "rabid anime fanboy" which is why she ended up Ka-fuku'd as well as "Ka-Girled." Since it also gave her a Chinese name he must have been ignorant as well as rabid. She ditches the fuku after Anne undoes the part of the spell that is messing with her head.

Web Original

• Sailor Nothing, as well as Sailors Truth and Beauty, wear embellished versions of their school uniforms when they're in sailor form.
• Vocaloid Rin Kagamine wears a sailor fuku top, though it's sleeveless. Her twin brother / mirror image Len wears a sleeved one.
• In the Whateley Universe, Tennyo's school uniform is based on this design.

Western Animation

• Katana, the (at first) girl Outsider in Batman the Brave And The Bold, wore a sailor suit in Season 1. However, in Season 2, she ditched it for the classic costume of her comic book counterpart.
• Lily wears one in Kappa Mikey, even though she actually is not a student.
• Totally Spies!: Madison, the President's daughter wears one.
• Napoleon Dynamite: In the second episode, a scantron dating machine pairs Napoleon up with a Japanese foreign exchange student named Tokiko, who's sporting Sailor Fuku and every other Japanese schoolgirl-related trope you can imagine.