It was a headline designed to make any right-thinking Briton choke on his morning tea. A group of British women, attending a football match against Japan, took it upon themselves to lecture Japanese fans on their littering habits. ‘Clean up your own stadiums at home,’ they said, with the moral superiority of a nanny state apparatchik. Never mind that Japan’s stadiums are among the cleanest in the world. Never mind that Japanese fans are renowned for their discipline, leaving their seats spotless even in the throes of defeat. No, these women had to export their sanctimony to Tokyo.
This is the decadence of a society that has forgotten what manners mean. In Victorian Britain, we knew our place. We cleaned up after ourselves. We did not travel to foreign lands to lecture our hosts on hygiene. If we had, we would have been laughed out of the country. Today, we have become a nation of scolds, exporting our guilt and our hypocrisy abroad. The Japanese do not need our advice. They need our respect. But respect is a foreign language to a generation taught to police the world.
The incident is a microcosm of a larger cultural collapse. We are obsessed with clean streets but we permit litter of the soul: the trash of reality television, the garbage of celebrity gossip, the filth of a thousand pointless arguments online. We lecture the Japanese on civic duty while our own town centres betray a decline into graffiti and neglect. This is the moral equivalent of a drunkard in a gutter explaining sobriety to a teetotaller.
In ancient Rome, they called it ‘luxuria’ – a decadence that rots empires from within. We are there now. Our women have become the food police, the litter police, the thought police. They travel to Tokyo to scold, but they cannot see the beam in their own eye. Japanese fans clean up as a matter of honour. They do not need a public sign to remind them. They do not need Twitter campaigns. They do it because it is right. Our women, by contrast, have confused loudness with virtue.
Let me be clear: I am not against cleaning up. I am against the arrogance that pretends we have anything to teach Japan. We are the ones who drop the litter. We are the ones who leave the mess behind. Our stadiums in Britain are a disgrace, with spilled beer and discarded tickets. But instead of fixing our own house, we travel abroad to hand out lessons. It is the final stage of a civilisation that has lost its sense of shame.
So here is my challenge to those women: if you wish to clean stadiums, start with your own. Clean up Wembley. Clean up Old Trafford. Then, perhaps, you will have earned the right to speak. Until then, you are just a tourist with a superiority complex. And the Japanese, being polite, will nod and smile. But they will not forget. They will remember that the British have become the world’s moralistic bores.
In the end, this is not about litter. It is about identity. A nation that projects its own failures onto others is a nation in decline. We are no longer the British who built an empire on discipline and order. We are the British who lecture the most disciplined people on earth on how to pick up a wrapper. It is a sad spectacle. And it is a warning.
The fall of empires is never heralded by trumpets. It is heralded by a thousand small acts of arrogance. This was one of them.
