Here we fucking go again. Japan play the Netherlands at Dallas Stadium, lose, win, draw, who cares, and the only thing the internet wants to talk about is the Japanese stadium clean-up tradition. Blue bin bags. Tidy rows of supporters bending down for crisp packets. And the entire planet of headline-writers spaffing themselves into a state of moral arousal because some football fans put their rubbish in a bag instead of on the floor.

Yaaawn. Genuinely. Yaaawn.

I have lived here long enough to watch this exact cycle every two years like a depressing fucking comet. The match ends. The cameras pan to the stands. The bags come out. Twitter discovers Japan for the four-hundredth time. "Other countries should LEARN from this." "This is what RESPECT looks like." And a billion people who have never queued at a ward office in their lives decide that a country which still runs on the fax machine is the pinnacle of human civilisation because it can tidy a row of seats.

Why the stadium clean-up is theatre, not virtue

Let me explain what you're actually applauding, because it isn't kindness and it isn't some ancient Zen reverence for the environment. It's kuuki wo yomu, reading the air, weaponised into a global content reel. It's the same instinct that makes a salaryman apologise to a vending machine. The bin bags aren't there because these people love Dallas Stadium. They're there because not picking up your litter, in front of cameras, representing the group, would be a social death so total that the bloody bag is easier.

It is tatemae. The public face. The performance of harmony. And it works a treat, because every two years a wave of foreigners who have never had to live inside that performance go absolutely doolally over how lovely it all is, while completely missing that the same cultural machine that produces tidy stands also produces the seventeen-form labyrinth, the hanko, and a working culture that drinks itself to death on a Tuesday to avoid leaving before the boss. You don't get the bin bags without the rest of it. They are the same fucking software.

And the smugness. Christ. "We should all be more like Japan." No you bloody shouldn't. You should put your own crisp packet in your own pocket because you're a functioning adult, not because a nation has gamified shame into a viral moment. The whole thing has the energy of a school assembly where one class gets a gold star and everyone else has to clap. Tossers, all of you, the lot of you, clapping.

The thing nobody clapping has actually noticed

Here's the bit that makes me want to lie down in the road. The country that cannot stop tidying a foreign stadium is the same country where you cannot find a single fucking bin on a Tokyo street. Try it. Walk through Shibuya holding an empty can and watch yourself become a wandering refugee for forty minutes looking for somewhere, anywhere, to put it. They removed the bins decades ago and never put them back. So the great clean tidy nation is, domestically, a place that solved litter by simply abolishing the receptacle and making it your problem to carry your rubbish home like a medieval pilgrim with relics.

But do that at a World Cup, in front of a camera, as a group? Gold star. Headline. "What can we learn."

For fuck's sake.

Nothing. You can learn nothing. It is not a miracle of national character that some people tidied up after themselves. It is the absolute floor of being a human in public, dressed up as a spiritual achievement by people who have never once had to perform it under threat. The fans aren't the muppets here. The fans are doing exactly what the air tells them to do, same as they always have. The muppets are the millions of you abroad who see a blue bin bag and decide an entire civilisation has been morally solved.

Next tournament. Same bags. Same headlines. Same wankers clapping. I'll be in the third bar, with my empty can, looking for a bin that isn't there.