The World Cup may be over, but the image of Japanese fans staying behind to clear the stadium aisles has lodged itself in the British conservative imagination like a stubborn sweet wrapper beneath a seat. Now, a chorus of MPs and commentators is demanding that this spectacle of civic duty become the new standard for British behaviour. But behind the calls for a national tidy-up lies a more uncomfortable question. What does it say about a society that needs a football tournament to remind it how to clean up after itself?
It is an enduring image, and one that has been doing the rounds since the Japanese team’s supporters first made global headlines in 2018. Grown men in blue Samurai shirts, bending to pick up crisp packets. Women in kimonos, collecting drink bottles. It is a scene that speaks of quiet, unshowy collectivism. It is also, for the British conservative, a very useful stick with which to beat their own countrymen.
The arguments are familiar. If the Japanese can do it, why can’t we? Where is our sense of public pride? Why must our streets look like the morning after a student party, while Tokyo’s Shibuya crossing gleams like a showroom floor? There is a grain of truth here. Britain’s public spaces are often shabby. But the conservative prescription tends to reduce a complex cultural phenomenon to a simple matter of will. They see the Japanese fans as paragons of virtue, and the British public as feckless and in need of a lesson. This is where the analysis falters.
The Japanese dedication to communal cleanliness is not a spontaneous impulse. It is the product of a lifetime of social conditioning. From primary school, children are taught to clean their own classrooms. There is a deep rooted belief that a shared space is a shared responsibility. This is not a national character trait to be copied, it is a social contract that has been written over centuries. And it is a contract that comes with its own costs. The pressure to conform, the hostility to visible difference, the way that public order can tip into public surveillance. The same system that produces pristine stadiums also produces a culture of intense social anxiety.
In Britain, the reasons for our litter strewn streets are more prosaic. Austerity has eviscerated local council budgets. The number of public bins has fallen sharply in many areas, while the frequency of street cleaning has been cut. Meanwhile, the privatisation of public services has created a patchwork of cleaning contracts that often prioritise profit over promptness. It is easier to moralise about the behaviour of individual citizens than it is to reverse a decade of public spending cuts. And it is much cheaper too.
So when a conservative MP says that Britons should ‘learn from Japan’, what they are really saying is that they do not want to pay for the bins to be emptied. They want the people to do it for free. And they want a society where everyone feels a shamed sense of obligation to pick up after themselves. There is a word for that. It is called privatisation of public goods. And it is a trap that the conservative mind is very fond of setting.
But the real world is more complicated. The British are not essentially slobs. There is a reason why the Great British Spring Clean attracts hundreds of thousands of volunteers every year. There is a reason why local litter picking groups have sprung up in towns and cities across the country. People do care. But they also know that they are being asked to clean up a mess that was not entirely of their making. The Japanese fans who stayed behind to tidy the stadium were not clearing up after corporate sponsors. They were clearing up after themselves. That is a different thing entirely.
The conservative call for a national clean up is, at heart, a call for a national change of heart. It is a sentimental appeal to a lost sense of community. But you cannot conjure community out of broomsticks and bin bags. Community is built on shared investment, shared resources, and a shared sense that the system works for everyone. Until those conditions are met, the streets will remain messy. And no amount of tutting at the Japanese will change that.
