Lessons from Arlington: What Japanese fans taught us about cleanliness

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat 

This is the scene after the Japan-Netherlands World Cup football match at Arlington, Texas, that ended in a draw. Winning and losing are part of the game, but here the Japanese spectators and supporters emerge clear winners. After the match was over, Japanese fans watching the game started collecting garbage and leftovers. Within minutes, they had cleaned the entire stadium.

This did not happen for the first time. The Japanese do it diligently whether they are at home or abroad, and it is not a staged event for them. They did it away from self-serving cameras.

Now look at what is happening in our own sacred zones in the Himalayas, where tourists are thronging to escape the oppressive heat of the plains. We do not want to learn from the cleanliness of the Himalayas; instead, we bring our ugliness there. Activists in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh are cleaning mountains and rivers, requesting tourists not to leave plastic bags, bottles, wrappers and other waste behind when they leave, but nobody bothers. Our gods must be appeased even if it means vitiating and polluting our holiest locations. Will these selfie tourists learn a few lessons from the extraordinary traits of the Japanese people? All of this must be part of our personality and not merely an event to be posted on social media.

The photographs were posted by FIFA on its social media platforms.

A big salute to the Japanese people and their sense of national identity — one that does not emerge from obscene sloganeering and vulgar displays, but from the pure and selfless practice of doing things that actually make their identity far more powerful. There is a lot to learn from them.