Learning from Japanese Football Fans

If you watched the recent England vs. Japan match at Wembley, you might have caught something remarkable that happened after the final whistle.

While most of the stadium emptied out, Japanese fans stayed behind with blue bin bags, meticulously cleaning the stands.

They weren't just picking up their own rubbish, but the mess left by others, too.

In the UK and many other places, the prevailing attitude is often, "That's what the stadium staff are paid for." It’s an individualistic mindset: we buy a ticket, consume the experience, and leave the cleanup to an authority or service provider.

But the Japanese approach reflects a deeply ingrained sense of collective responsibility. It’s the simple but profound understanding that shared spaces belong to all of us, and therefore, caring for them is a shared duty.

Watching this play out at Wembley got me thinking about how we view broader societal challenges, and specifically, how we look at volunteering.

Too often, we look to authorities—governments, councils, or corporations—to fix the issues in our communities. We wait for someone else to "clean up the stadium."

But at its absolute best, volunteering is the exact same mindset as those fans at Wembley.

It is active citizenship. It is solidarity. It is taking shared ownership of our environment.

Volunteering isn't just about doing a good deed; it’s a rejection of the idea that we are just passive consumers in society. It’s looking at a shared space, a shared community, or a shared challenge and saying, "I have a role to play here. This is our responsibility, not just theirs."

Imagine how much better our shared spaces—and our society as a whole—could be if we leaned less on outsourcing our problems and more on shared ownership.

What are your thoughts? How can we foster more of this collective mindset in our communities and our workplaces?