Midori Mayama, a Japanese reporter in Qatar for the World Cup, said that fans collecting rubbish was a non-story back home.
"Nobody in Japan would report on this," she said, noting the same clean-up happens at Japanese professional baseball games. "All of this is so normal."
It may be normal to Japanese, but Alberto Zaccheroni, an Italian who coached Japan from 2010 to 2014, said it's not how most teams act when they travel.
"Everywhere in the world players take their kit off and leave it on the floor in the changing room. Then the cleaning staff come and collect it," he said. "Not the Japanese players. They put all the shorts on top of the other, all the pairs of socks and all the jerseys."