Every four years, the same scene plays out. The final whistle goes, the crowds filter out, and Japan's supporters pull out bags and start collecting rubbish — including other people's. It happened in France in 1998. Russia in 2018. Qatar in 2022. It'll happen again at the 2026 World Cup when Japan open their campaign in Arlington, Texas, and Monterrey, Mexico.
Non-Japanese observers tend to react with bafflement or admiration. But academics who study Japan say the surprise is misplaced — this behaviour isn't extraordinary in the context of how Japanese people are raised.
"Japanese sports fans at world events who clean up the stadium are behaving much the same way they did when they learned how to enjoy sports as school boys and girls," said Koichi Nakano, who teaches politics and history at Sophia University.
Learned before they could kick a ball
Japanese elementary schools typically don't employ janitors. Students clean the classrooms and schoolyards themselves. There are also relatively few public bins in Japan, so people carry their waste home — keeping streets cleaner and cutting the cost of waste collection. By the time a Japanese fan walks into a World Cup stadium, tidying up after themselves is not a choice, it's a default.
The concept of meiwaku — not inconveniencing others — runs through it. Leaving rubbish piled up in a stadium isn't just messy, it's inconsiderate. In a country where greater Tokyo alone holds around 35 million people, the social pressure to not be a burden to those around you shapes behaviour in ways that visitors from more individualistic cultures don't always clock.
"You don't want to bother people. It goes to all areas of life in Japan," said Barbara Holthus, deputy director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo.
It goes beyond the World Cup
The tradition isn't confined to football's showpiece event. Japanese fans cleaned up at the Under-20 World Cup in Chile last year. Last month at Wembley, after Japan beat England 1-0 in a friendly, the same thing happened.
William Kelly, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Yale, links the behaviour specifically to football rather than Japanese sport in general — tracing it back to the founding of the J-League over 30 years ago, which deliberately emphasised community ties and club identity over spectacle.
"Soccer fans felt, and feel, more a part of the club and its stadium," Kelly wrote.
The media attention has reinforced it too. What began as an unnoticed cultural habit is now a point of national pride — and a story that gets written every four years without fail. As Jeff Kingston of Temple University Japan put it: "Now that the media has latched onto the story and lavished praise on Japanese fans, they have made it a point of pride to display those values and norms."
In Japan, there is a phrase for it: Tatsu tori ato wo nigosazu. A bird leaves nothing behind.
