In what can only be described as a seismic cultural earthquake registered on the Richter scale of household decency, Japanese women have issued an urgent directive to their nation's football fans: if you are capable of cleaning a stadium, you are damn well capable of cleaning a toilet. This follows the now-infamous World Cup gesture where Japanese supporters, with characteristic precision and groupthink, tidied up their section of the stand, leaving it as sterile as a nun's conscience. The world applauded, as it always does, mistaking a chore for a virtue.
But now the matriarchs of Nippon have spoken, and their message is both simple and staggeringly obvious: why is your own home a festering swamp of discarded beer cans and unread newspapers? Tidy the stadium, tidy the soul," ran the headline in the Asahi Shimbun, but every wife in Osaka was thinking, "
Tidy the bloody kitchen first." The UK, ever eager to clap at other people's good behaviour while ignoring its own feral underbellies, has thrown its support behind the Japanese women. It's about time,"
declared a spokesperson for the British Institute of Spotless Countertops, a think tank I just invented. If you can pick up a crisp packet after a match, why can't you pick up your own underpants from the bathroom floor?" The hypocrisy is, as always, as thick as the grout in a rundown chippy.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, British football fans are actively attempting to turn stadiums into landfill sites, then complaining about the price of pies. The Japanese women have inadvertently exposed a global crisis: the gender chore gap, illuminated by the beam of a wiped-down seat. They have, with ruthless logic, asked: if the fans can be shamed into tidying a public space, why can't they be shamed into tidying a private one?
The answer, as any man knows, is because no one brings a television crew to your bedroom. The Sun has already launched a campaign: "Clean Your Own Bloody House, You Lazy Sods."
It is, I suspect, a charter for marital armageddon. So raise a glass of gimlet-eyed gin to the women of Japan. They have done more for domestic equality than a thousand parliamentary debates.
They have simply pointed out that if you can tidy a stadium, you can tidy your own underpants. And if you can't, you are not a cultural ambassador. You are just a slob with a passport.
