There is a story going round, one that will no doubt be seized upon by the usual suspects as evidence of British moral superiority. Japanese football fans, after a match in some far-flung venue, were seen cleaning the stadium. They picked up litter, they swept, they did the kind of thing that would make a Victorian housemaid nod in approval. And then, the British press, ever eager to pat itself on the back, lauded this behaviour as a model for us all. “Do it at home too,” they said, as if the British were suddenly in need of a lecture on deportment from a nation that once invented the stiff upper lip.
Let us examine this phenomenon without the usual sentimental fog. The Japanese are indeed a clean people. They have a word for it, “kirei,” which means both clean and beautiful. It is not a cultural accident but a product of centuries of Shinto purification rituals, Buddhist austerity, and a social compact that prizes the group over the individual. When a Japanese fan picks up a crisp packet, he is not doing it because he read a pamphlet on civic duty. He is doing it because his ancestors have done something like it for a millennium. It is encoded in his bones.
Now consider the British. We have a different heritage. We are the people who gave the world the Industrial Revolution, which covered everything in soot, and the British Empire, which exported that soot to the tropics. We are a nation of messy improvisers, of eccentricity and untidy gardens. Our great literary tradition, from Shakespeare to Monty Python, celebrates the chaotic, the absurd, the slightly grubby. To demand that we suddenly become a nation of neat-freaks is not just unrealistic; it is a betrayal of who we are.
But the real issue is not about litter. It is about the creeping globalisation of manners. The West, particularly Britain, has been in a state of moral panic about its own decline for decades. We look to the East – first to Japan, then to South Korea, now to China – for models of discipline and order. We forget that these models come with their own costs: social conformity, mental health crises, and a work ethic that borders on the pathological. The Japanese salaryman does not have a better life than the British office worker; he has a different set of chains.
I am not saying we should become slobs. I am saying that the moralising tone of this story – the “do it at home too” – reveals a deeper unease. It is the unease of a society that has lost its own ethical compass and is now looking for direction from strangers. The Victorians, for all their faults, did not look to Tokyo for guidance on how to behave. They were too busy telling the Japanese how to behave.
So by all means, let us learn from the Japanese. Let us perhaps pick up a bit more litter. But let us stop pretending that cleanliness is the highest virtue, or that mimicking another culture’s habits will restore our lost sense of purpose. The British way is not the Japanese way. It is messier, more honest, and ultimately more human. If we want to be a great nation again, we need to rediscover our own virtues, not borrow someone else’s.
And if that means leaving a crisp packet on the ground every now and then, so be it. At least it will be our crisp packet, on our ground, in our beloved mess of a country.
