So the Japanese fans, having scrubbed a stadium in Qatar to a hospital-grade gleam, are now being told to ‘do it at home too’. The UK culture secretary, in a fit of what passes for statesmanship, has praised this as a ‘global standard’. One must admire the audacity. Here is a nation that once taught the world the meaning of civility, now reduced to taking lessons from a people who bow when they answer the phone. The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast.
Let us pause to consider the historical arc. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that empire was about more than exploitation. It was about a certain moral tone, a sense of duty, a belief that one’s behaviour set an example. Today, we have a culture secretary who looks at a group of foreign football fans tidying up and sees not a quaint custom but a ‘standard’ to be adopted. This is the intellectual equivalent of declaring that because the Swiss make good cheese, we should all become Alpine dairy farmers.
The Japanese have a concept: ‘mottainai’, a regret over waste. It is a deeply ingrained, almost spiritual notion. It is not something you can legislate. It is not something a government minister can command. It is the product of centuries of island living, of limited resources, of a society that learned to value order because chaos was never an option. To suggest that we can simply graft this onto British culture is to misunderstand the very nature of culture itself. It is like demanding that a cactus grow leaves and flowers because you admire the rose.
But let us be honest. The real problem is not the Japanese. It is us. We have become a nation that looks outward for guidance because we have lost faith in our own instincts. We admire the discipline of others because we have forgotten how to discipline ourselves. The Japanese fans cleaned that stadium because their culture tells them that leaving a mess is a sign of disrespect. Not to the Qataris. Not to the World Cup. But to themselves. That is a reflex, a muscle memory, not a policy.
Meanwhile, in Britain, we have a government that cannot keep the trains running on time, that sees litter as a matter for municipal fines rather than personal shame. And now we are expected to applaud a minister who thinks that praising Japanese hygiene is a substitute for addressing our own decay. It is the politics of the vacuum. Where content is absent, gesture fills the void.
One thinks of Rome. The empire did not fall because the barbarians were strong. It fell because Romans stopped believing in Rome. They outsourced their civic pride to mercenaries and bureaucrats. They looked to the provinces for fresh ideas while the old virtues crumbled. Sound familiar? We now outsource our sense of national decency to the Japanese. The culture secretary is not setting a standard. She is waving a white flag.
Let the Japanese clean their stadiums. Let them bow. Let them be the paragons of a social order we can only envy from afar. But do not pretend that this is a ‘global standard’ that can be imported like a cheap DVD. Standards are not global. They are local. They are born from history, from struggle, from the unspoken agreements of millions of people who decide that this is how we behave. You can no more adopt another culture’s ethos than you can adopt another man’s skeleton.
In the end, the tragedy is not that we lack Japanese cleanliness. It is that we lack the humility to recognise what we have lost. We live in a country where a minister can stand up and tell the public to be more like the Japanese, and not one person points out that we used to be the ones setting the example. That is the true measure of our fall. Not the litter on the street. But the silence in the chamber.
