What Is Penlight Culture? Japan's Color-Coded Concert Light Sticks, Explained by Marine

Article

The colorful wands lighting up every Japanese idol concert have a specific origin story — and an unexpected connection to a tokusatsu superhero show.

From a 1974 Concert to Concert Standard

Penlight culture traces back to a 1974 Hideki Saijo concert at Osaka Stadium. Disposable chemical glow sticks were common through the 1980s-90s, with idol agencies beginning to sell official lights by the late 1990s.

Member Colors, Inspired by Power Rangers

The now-standard practice of assigning each group member a color is believed to trace to the Super Sentai series (Power Rangers). Modern battery-powered penlights let fans set multiple colors via connected apps.

What To Know

Tracing member-color penlight culture back to Super Sentai / Power Rangers is a genuinely surprising cross-genre connection — a tokusatsu superhero show's color-coding convention ended up shaping idol fandom decades later.

Penlight culture's 1974 origin at a single concert, followed by decades of gradual standardization, shows how a spontaneous fan practice can formalize into an industry-wide convention over time.

What Fans Are Saying

• "The Power Rangers connection to member colors is such a fun surprise."
• "1974 is way earlier than I expected for penlight origins."
• "App-connected penlights are such a modern evolution of this."

Original Japanese

• 「メンバーカラーが戦隊シリーズ由来というのは意外です」
• 「1974年起源というのは思ったより古いですね」
• 「アプリ連動のペンライトは現代らしい進化だと思います」

Easy Japanese

「ペンライト」は、コンサートでファンが振る光る棒です。メンバーごとに色が決まっていることが多いです。