The sight of Japanese fans at a World Cup bagging trash after a match — win or lose — always surprises non-Japanese. Japanese players are famous for doing the same in their team dressing room: hanging up towels, cleaning the floor and even leaving a thank-you note.
The behavior is driving social media posts at the World Cup in Qatar, but it is nothing unusual for Japanese fans or players. They are simply doing what most people in Japan do — at home, at school, at work or on streets from Tokyo to Osaka, Shizuoka to Sapporo.
“For Japanese people, this is just the normal thing to do,” Japan coach Hajime Moriyasu said. “When you leave, you have to leave a place cleaner than it was before. That’s the education we have been taught. That’s the basic culture we have. For us, it’s nothing special.”
Photo: AFP
A spokeswoman for the Japan Football Association said it is supplying 8,000 trash bags to help fans pick up after matches with “thank you” messages on the outside written in Arabic, Japanese and English.
Barbara Holthus, a sociologist who has spent the past decade in Japan, said that cleaning up after oneself is ingrained in Japanese culture.
“You’re always supposed to take your trash home in Japan, because there are no trash cans on the street,” said Holthus, the deputy director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies. “You clean your classroom. From a very young age you learn you are responsible for the cleanliness of your own space.”
Photo: AFP
Many Japanese elementary schools do not have janitors, so some of the cleanup work is left to the young students. Office workers often dedicate an hour to spruce up their areas.
“It’s partly cultural, but also the education structures have been training you for a long time to do that,” Holthus added.
This is Japan’s seventh straight World Cup, and their cleanliness began making news at their first World Cup in 1998 in France.
Prior to the 2020 Olympics, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike cautioned that visiting fans would have to learn to clean up after themselves.
However, the problem never materialized after fans from abroad were banned from attending the Games because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tokyo has few public trash receptacles. This keeps the streets cleaner, saves municipalities the costs of emptying trash cans and keeps away vermin.
Midori Mayama, a Japanese reporter in Qatar for the World Cup, said that fans collecting trash was a nonstory back home.
“Nobody in Japan would report on this,” she said, noting the same cleanup happens at Japanese professional baseball games. “All of this is so normal.”
It might be normal to Japanese, but Alberto Zaccheroni, an Italian who coached Japan from 2010 to 2014, said it is not how most teams act when they travel.
“Everywhere in the world players take their kit [uniform] off and leave it on the floor in the changing room. Then the cleaning staff come and collect it,” he said. “Not the Japanese players. They put all the shorts on top of the other, all the pairs of socks and all the jerseys.”
EARLY LOSSES: Some sports have already started at the Asian Games in Hangzhou ahead of the opening ceremony on Saturday, including volleyball, with a Taiwan loss South Korea’s bid for a third straight men’s gold medal in soccer at the Asian Games got off to the perfect start with a 9-0 thrashing of Kuwait on Tuesday, but coach Hwang Sun-hong is giving his players little time to enjoy it. With a more testing group match against Thailand today, Hwang is wary of complacency creeping in after his side ran riot against Kuwait in Jinhua, China, southwest of host city Hangzhou. “We’ll pretend this match never happened,” Hwang said after the Kuwait game, Yonhap news agency reported. “We have even more difficult matches coming up later, and we have
‘NOTHING HAS CHANGED’: Jenni Hermoso said that the striking players had been ‘caught by surprise’ by the call-ups, saying it was a strategy to intimidate them Striking Spanish internationals called up to the women’s team on Monday reiterated their desire not to form part of the squad in a new blow for the shaken the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF). However, they were told by the government early yesterday that those who did not attend the team’s camps when called up would have to be punished. Spanish National Sports Council president Victor Francos said he would have to apply the country’s sports law. “If they don’t turn up, the government would have to apply the law, which is a pity for me, but the law is the
China hopes to make a splash with the Asian Games, which officially open tomorrow, but nationwide excitement has been muted as the economy sputters and some question the cost of the sporting extravaganza. Delayed a year by the COVID-19 pandemic, the quadrennial Games, kicking off in the eastern city of Hangzhou, will be China’s biggest sporting event in more than a decade, with more than 12,000 athletes from 45 nations competing in 40 sports. Organizers this week expressed confidence in holding a “magnificent” Games, thanks to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “important instructions” and great, broad-based efforts. Analysts agree the event would likely
Hong Kong is one of the smaller Asian Games teams by population, but when it comes to fencing the territory is a regional heavyweight with ambitious medal hopes. Edgar Cheung won gold at the Tokyo Games two years ago — Hong Kong’s first Olympic fencing title and first Olympic gold in any sport in 25 years. It turned Cheung into a celebrity overnight and prompted parents across the territory to rush and sign their children up for fencing classes. Cheung’s historic win in the foil competition was a much-needed dose of good news for a territory mired in social unrest and COVID-19 gloom