Japan fans brought their own blue garbage bags to a World Cup match. No stadium rule required it. They brought the bags from home. They do this at every tournament, in every stadium, win or lose. Nearly 80 years of deliberate education built this habit.
Tokyo, with 13 million residents, is one of the cleanest megacities on the planet. It achieved that after most of its public trash cans were removed following a 1995 terror attack. The bins never fully came back. The streets stayed spotless anyway.
The explanation starts at age 6, long before anyone thinks about football. In Japanese schools, students handle all the daily cleaning themselves. Four days a week after lunch, they spend 20 minutes scrubbing classrooms, hallways, and bathrooms in a session called "Soji." The broader program is "Tokkatsu," meaning "special activities," and Japan built it into the national curriculum in 1947 while rebuilding the education system after World War II. Over 12 years, a student completes nearly 2,000 of these sessions.
The lesson is direct: if you use a space, you take responsibility for it. The stadium section belongs to you for 90 minutes. Leave it better.
At the 2018 World Cup, Japan fans cleaned the Rostov Arena stands after losing 3-2 to Belgium in the final seconds. They had been 2-0 up. The team's dressing room, also spotless, held a note that said "thank you" in Russian. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the dressing room had 11 origami cranes and a thank-you note in Japanese and Arabic.
Grief doesn't suspend the behavior. A camera doesn't trigger it. Nearly 2,000 cleaning sessions completed before age 18 makes it automatic.
Japan has run this system since 1947. The stadium section is just a classroom with 70,000 seats.
El 13 de junio de 2021, murió don Raúl Carvajal, esperando justicia sobre el caso de su hijo soldado, que habría sido asesinado por negarse a cometer falsos positivos.
Países con las mayores reservas de agua dulce en el mundo. (FAO AquaStat)
1⃣🇧🇷 Brasil
2⃣🇷🇺 Rusia
3⃣🇺🇸 EEUU
4⃣🇨🇦 Canadá
5⃣🇨🇳 China
6⃣🇨🇴 Colombia
Colombia es bendita en agua.
Te comparto las propuestas de @IvanCepedaCast para proteger nuestros páramos.
#MeLaJuegoPorElAgua🩵
In September 1942, a single Japanese floatplane lifted off from a submarine off the coast of Oregon. In the cockpit sat Chief Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita, carrying two 170-pound incendiary bombs and a 400-year-old samurai sword beside him in the cramped space.
His mission?
Drop the bombs over the forests of the Pacific Northwest, start a massive firestorm, and force the U.S. military to pull vital resources away from the Pacific theater.
Fujita released his bombs over Brookings, Oregon. But the mission failed. Recent rain had soaked the forest, and alert park rangers put out the small fires almost immediately. The war continued, and the strange, isolated attack slowly slipped into the margins of history.
Until 20 years later.
In 1962, a civic group in Brookings came up with an extraordinary idea. They found Fujita and invited him back as the guest of honor at their local festival.
The invitation caused national controversy and split the town. But the deepest conflict was inside Fujita himself. Deeply ashamed of what he had done during the war, Fujita accepted the invitation with a dark private promise. He packed his family’s ancient samurai sword in his luggage. Later, he admitted that if the Americans put him on trial for war crimes or publicly humiliated him, he planned to use the sword to commit seppuku, ritual suicide, right there.
But when he stepped off the plane, he was met not with hatred, but with handshakes, applause, and a town offering real forgiveness.
Overwhelmed by the mercy of the people he had once attacked, Fujita stepped to the podium and did something no one forgot. He knelt and gave the town his most treasured possession, his family’s 400-year-old samurai sword, as a lasting promise of peace.
For the rest of his life, Fujita helped fund student exchange programs between Japan and Oregon. He even returned to the exact place he had bombed and planted a redwood “peace tree.” When he died in 1997, Brookings named him an honorary citizen, and his daughter later returned to the forest to scatter some of his ashes on the land he had once tried to burn.
Today, that 400-year-old sword is displayed inside the Brookings Public Library, not as a trophy of war, but as a masterpiece of peace.
US troops in the Philippines aren't "defending" anything > they're turning a sovereign nation into the next Ukraine proxy against its #1 trading partner, China.
History repeats: America colonized the PH, used concentration camps & torture (per their own State Dept records), then never really left.
On Independence Day, Filipinos are right to chant "US troops out now."
Prioritize development over endless US-driven militarization, or watch poverty & destruction deepen.
Real independence means choosing your own path, not Washington's.
The problem was never Trump.
Trump is the readable version of a text that was always there, written in language most people couldn't access.
The problem is the system that produced him, that uses him, that will survive him, and that will next time find someone equally willing to do what he does but competent enough to do it quietly.
The competent version is more dangerous.
The competent version rebuilds the language. Restores the branding. Hires the speechwriters who know how to say "shared values" and "rules-based order" while executing identical policy.
And the people who spent four years appalled by Trump's vulgarity will feel the relief of good grammar and take it for moral improvement.
The empire doesn't need Trump specifically.
It needed what he provided: a stress test. A period of operation without the usual ideological cover, to see what held and what didn't.
What held: the sanctions. The bases. The vetoes. The dollar. The weapons sales. The regime change operations.
What didn't hold: the manners.
And when someone comes along who can restore the manners while keeping everything else, and they will, they always do, the people who thought the problem was the manners will call it a recovery.
The rest of us will know what it actually is.
Mañana comenzará el Mundial, y muchos estarán atentos a los partidos. El fútbol nos recuerda algo que no debemos olvidar: la vida no es una carrera para lucirse en solitario, sino un camino que aprendemos a recorrer juntos. Quien no sabe pasar el balón, aunque tenga talento, todavía no ha entendido el juego. Y quien no sabe vivir con los demás y para los demás, todavía no ha entendido la vida. #ViajeApostólico