‘A bird that flies never leaves a trace’: Why is Japan always so tidy at the World Cup?

 

Fans of Team Japan cheer in the stands during training for the 2026 FIFA World Cup on June 8 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Alan Poizner/Imagn Images/Reuters

Nobody can predict how the 48 teams will do at the FIFA World Cup this summer, but if you wanted to gamble on Japan being the tidiest team, you’d surely clean up at the bookies. Thanks to a societal expectation of all Japanese people, you’d never know they were there.

Nozomi Morgan, founder and CEO of Michiki Morgan Worldwide and an intercultural leadership expert, vividly remembers moving from Seattle to Tokyo when she was eight years old, partly because the school experience was so different.

“One of the first things that really surprised me,” she told CNN Sports, “you take off your ‘outside shoes’ and change into ‘inside shoes,’ you want to keep the inside as clean as possible.”

But that was just the beginning, her parents had packed her off to school with a Zokin, which she would need every day. “Each child has their own rag, several pieces of recycled fabric, hand-sewn together, with their names on it,” she said. “I remember specifically the first assignment was to clean the classroom.”

All the chairs and desks would be moved to the front; the children would sweep it up and then they would clean the floor with their little rags: “It kind of felt like a little game that you play cleaning up, it wasn’t like a chore, it’s just something that we all did together.”

“I hated every minute of it,” Hirokazu Tsunoda told CNN. “I resented it, I used to think, ‘Why do we even have to do this? Japanese classrooms aren’t that dirty to begin with, and everyone uses the bins anyway.’”

You’d never know he used to feel this way. Since 2008, he’s been attending the Olympic Games and World Cups, always helping to clean up the mess left by the supporters in the arenas.

“It’s not a place where you can do whatever you like simply because you paid for a ticket,” he said. “For us, it’s a sacred space. If something is a passion you truly care about, you don’t want to leave the place that matters to you in a mess. So, you pick it up.”

Tsunoda says that it wasn’t until he was an adult, helping to clear up the litter at his daughter’s school that he truly appreciated the value or cleaning up, or not making a mess to begin with.