The Fifa World Cup took the world by storm with a variety of unexpected twists and turns along the way for many of the matches. But one of the things that surprised me the most was the Japanese soccer team and how far they ended up going. My family and I along with all the other local Japanese people were supporting the entire time.
The last game they had against Belgium was extremely intense. I was watching with my Japanese co-workers while at work and we were cheering-- a lot. The Japanese soccer team was able to get two goals before the end of the first half and a lot of people were pretty optimistic about the outcome for the Japanese team. Then the second half started and the Belgians were pretty quick to catch up. We watched with a great deal of hope that the Japanese could pull it off until the end of the game, but the Belgians scored another goal in the last 20 seconds of the entire game.
Everyone was pretty devastated.
As I watched the Japanese soccer players fall to their knees crying and the coach unable to speak in an interview after the game, I only felt admiration and empathy for their hard-work and their loss. They gave it their all and they weren't able to win, but along with the Japanese spectators (who were shown to be very supportive to the team in interviews after the game), the players accepted their loss and many of them were optimistic for the future of the team. I was extremely proud to be a Japanese at that moment. But after the game was also a surprise.
After this game, American media and the rest of the world gathered attention to how the Japanese took to cleaning the entire stadium despite their loss. When I first saw the headline complimenting the team, and the picture of Japanese people cleaning the stadium, I was extremely proud. The Japanese have been doing this act for a while, but this year they received a great deal of attention for it. Many took videos and pictures after the game of Japanese picking up trash in the aisles of the stadium.
The Japanese keeping a public space clean is a natural kind of knack and I never questioned why or how: it just was. But many parts of the world looked at what the Japanese did, and are learning from what they did after the game, and a few are looking to implement that into their school system like in the Japanese school system. At that moment, I was extremely proud to be part Japanese.
