The news that Japanese football fans have been instructed to clean their own stadium at home has sent a ripple of what can only be described as bourgeois horror through the British chattering classes. The Japanese, you see, have this quaint habit of tidying up after themselves. They take their rubbish, they wipe their seats, they leave the arena as pristine as a Shinto shrine.
And the British response? A collective wringing of hands and a bleating cry for a 'cultural shift' in global travel. Good Lord, what have we become?
We have turned a simple act of civic decency into a moral panic, a sign of our own deep-seated inadequacy. We are the empire that once prided itself on stiff upper lips and orderly queues, now reduced to envying the litter-collection habits of an island nation. The Japanese have a word for it: 'mottainai', a sense of regret over waste.
We have a word for it too: 'shambolic'. The fact that a British official has publicly called for a cultural shift suggests we have surrendered any pretence of national pride. We are now a nation that looks to Tokyo for lessons in how to behave at a football match.
One shudders to think what the Victorians would make of this. They, at least, understood that civilisation is built on small, tedious rituals: sweeping the streets, polishing the brass, not leaving your empty cup on the seat for someone else to pick up. The Japanese have not discovered some arcane secret.
They have simply retained a modicum of collective responsibility. We, on the other hand, have outsourced our conscience to the nearest steward. The real crisis is not that Japanese fans are cleaner, but that we have convinced ourselves this is a matter of cultural difference rather than simple, universal decency.
We are in the midst of a spiritual decline, a slow rot of the social fabric. The British public, once famed for its pragmatism and resilience, now needs a government directive to pick up its own litter. It is a sad state of affairs.
The intellectual decadence here is breathtaking: we frame our own slovenliness as a 'cultural trait' worthy of respect, while simultaneously demanding that the Japanese teach us their ways. It is the worst of both worlds: we neither uphold our own standards nor adopt theirs. We simply wallow in self-congratulatory mediocrity.
If we wish to avoid the fate of Rome, we might start by not treating a football stadium as a pigsty. Rome fell because its citizens lost their civic virtue. We are not far behind.
The Japanese fans are not exceptional. They are simply what every citizen should be: someone who cleans up their own mess. That we find this remarkable is the most damning indictment of our age.
