Japan’s surprising success at the 2018 World Cup in Russia has dominated headlines and morning shows domestically. News organizations abroad, however, honed in on a very different topic — trash.
It was a virtual replay of one of the last World Cup’s most viral stories: Japanese supporters stuck around after the national team’s matches and cleaned up their own garbage. Western websites gushed over the practice, with numerous outlets devoting space to explaining why this was part of Japanese culture at large. Upping the ante from 2014, fans of other countries joined in, leading to more uplifting stories and speculation that Japan kick-started this tidying-up trend.
Perhaps it’s the latest incarnation of some people’s fascination with “nice Japan,” or just a smear of marshmallow cream on a particularly depressing online news cycle. However, it’s defined Japan’s World Cup in English-language media (and served as a wake-up call for some Chinese media). Japanese news outlets, meanwhile, haven’t latched onto it quite as hard — the squad’s performance leads — but plenty of reports and tweets have celebrated this shared interest in collecting rubbish. It tiptoes toward Japanese exceptionalism, but for the most part is taken as feel-good content for Facebook.