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.”
SSC Napoli on Saturday further extended their grip on the Serie A title race by beating local rivals US Salernitana 1919 2-0 to temporarily move 12 points ahead of the chasing pack. Goals from Giovanni di Lorenzo and Victor Osimhen immediately either side of halftime made sure that Napoli would be at least nine points clear at the halfway point of the season after a straight-forward win in soaking Salerno. Luciano Spalletti’s side now have to wait until their closest rivals AC Milan take on UEFA Champions League-chasing SS Lazio in Rome tomorrow to know just how far in front they would
A decade ago when the whippet-like Nairo Quintana burst onto the scene with stunning mountain escapes, Colombian cyclists looked poised to take over the world, but now the nation is in shock as three of its biggest stars flounder for very different reasons. At 32, Quintana is still Colombia’s most popular “beetle” — as its cyclists are known collectively — but he cannot even find a team. Egan Bernal, the only Colombian to win the Tour de France, is struggling to rediscover his former level after a near-fatal training crash, while Miguel Angel Lopez, nicknamed “Superman,” was kicked out of his team
POLEAXED: Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina swept past last year’s French Open and US Open winner Iga Swiatek at a stunned Rod Laver Arena Top seed Iga Swiatek and a tearful Coco Gauff both crashed out in straight sets in the round-of-16 yesterday on another day of shocks at the Australian Open, while Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching advanced to the third round of the women’s doubles. Swiatek’s defeat to Elena Rybakina makes it the first Grand Slam in the Open era — since 1968 — to lose the top two seeds in the men’s and women’s draws before the quarter-finals. There was no such trouble for Jessica Pegula, as the American third seed surged into the last eight with a 7-5, 6-2 win over former French Open
Former NBA sensation Jeremy Lin, who recently announced he is joining the Kaohsiung Steelers in the P.League+, is to arrive in the country next week, the Taiwanese American wrote on Instagram yesterday. “I want to be very honest in telling everyone my plans because I don’t want any miscommunication. As of what I know, I will be flying to Taiwan next week, but I don’t know which day as I will need some time to meet my teammates, fit into the [team’s] system, and get prepared physically,” Lin said. Lin said he has not played an official basketball game for about two
RSS