‘Normal thing to do’: Japanese followers tidy up at World Cup

The sight of Japanese followers at a World Cup bagging trash after a match — win or lose — at all times surprises non-Japanese. Japanese gamers are well-known for doing the identical of their workforce dressing room: hanging up towels, cleansing the ground, and even leaving a thank-you notice.

The habits is driving social media posts on the World Cup in Qatar, nevertheless it’s nothing uncommon for Japanese followers or gamers. They are merely doing what most individuals in Japan do — at residence, at college, 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 mentioned. “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.”

A spokeswoman for the Japanese Football Association mentioned it’s supplying 8,000 trash baggage to assist followers decide up after matches with “thank you” messages on the surface written in Arabic, Japanese, and English.

Barbara Holthus, a sociologist who has spent the final decade in Japan, mentioned cleansing up after oneself is engrained in Japanese tradition.

“You’re always supposed to take your trash home in Japan, because there are no trash cans on the street,” mentioned 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.”

Many Japanese elementary colleges don’t have janitors, so a few of the clean-up work is left to the younger college students. Office employees typically 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 started making information at their first World Cup in 1998 in France.

Prior to the 2020 Olympics, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike cautioned that visiting followers must study to wash up after themselves. However, the issue by no means materialized after followers from overseas had been banned from attending the Games due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tokyo has few public trash receptacles. This retains the streets cleaner, saves municipalities the prices of emptying trash cans, and retains away vermin.

Midori Mayama, a Japanese reporter in Qatar for the World Cup, mentioned that followers amassing garbage was a non-story again residence.

“Nobody in Japan would report on this,” she mentioned, noting the identical clean-up occurs at Japanese skilled baseball video games. “All of this is so normal.”

It could also be regular to Japanese, however Alberto Zaccheroni, an Italian who coached Japan from 2010 to 2014, mentioned it’s not how most groups act after they journey.

“Everywhere in the world players take their kit off and leave it on the floor in the changing room. Then the cleaning staff come and collect it,” he mentioned. “Not the Japanese players. They put all the shorts on top of the other, all the pairs of socks and all the jerseys.”