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By John Shegerian
Chairman and CEO, ERI
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In June, after a 2-2 draw with the Netherlands in Arlington, Texas, thousands of Japanese soccer fans did something that still stops the rest of the world in its tracks.
They stayed. They pulled out blue plastic bags, walked the aisles of a stadium that was not their own, and picked up cups, wrappers, and bottles, many of them left by other people.
Down below, their national team left its locker room cleaner than it found it.
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This was no stunt. Japanese fans were first noticed cleaning stadiums at the 1998 World Cup in France, their country’s debut on soccer’s biggest stage, and they have done it at every tournament since. In Recife in 2014, they bagged trash after a painful loss to Ivory Coast.
In Rostov-on-Don in 2018, after a last-minute defeat to Belgium, the players swept their dressing room and left a one-word note for their Russian hosts: spasibo, which means thank you. In Doha in 2022, after stunning Germany, they left folded towels, eleven origami cranes and a 'thank you' card. FIFA, the media, and millions of global observers online have applauded the Japanese every time.
It's Not Etiquette, It's a Worldview
We marvel because this behavior feels foreign. It shouldn’t. What we are watching is not mere etiquette. It is a worldview, and it happens to be exactly the operating system the rest of the world needs for the Anthropic, NVIDIA, and SpaceX economy we are now building.
That worldview has deep roots. In Shinto, Japan’s indigenous faith, kegare describes impurity or defilement, a state that disrupts the harmony between people, nature, and the sacred. Visitors to any shrine still rinse their hands and mouths before they enter. In this tradition, cleanliness is not about hygiene. It is about respect.
That respect is taught early through o-soji, the daily cleaning period in most Japanese schools. Children sweep floors, wipe windows, and scrub bathrooms themselves. There is no janitor to blame and no one else to clean up after you. The lesson is simple: the spaces we share are ours to care for. Then there is gomi hiroi, the humble act of picking up litter. Its most famous practitioner is the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, the biggest star in baseball.
Cameras routinely catch him stooping to pick up stray trash on the field, even on the World Series stage. As a high school student, Ohtani drew up a goal chart for becoming a top draft pick. Alongside strength and pitch velocity, he listed picking up trash. His reasoning was that litter is luck other people have thrown away, and he intended to collect it.
When you put these ideas together, you get a society in which waste is never someone else’s problem. It is a reflection of who you really are.
Reflection Of Japanese Culture
Japan’s business culture carries the same idea into commerce. Centuries ago, the traveling merchants of Ohmi, in what is now Shiga Prefecture, delivered their goods to towns across the country.
To be welcome in communities that were not their own, they lived by a principle later summed up as Sampo-yoshi: good for three sides. A deal had to be good for the seller, good for the buyer, and good for society. Trade that met local needs built social trust and businesses that continued for multiple generations.
ITOCHU, one of Japan’s great trading houses, was founded in 1858 by an Ohmi merchant named Chubei Itoh. In 2020, it formally adopted Sampo-yoshi as its corporate mission as a reflection of its founder’s business philosophy that has shaped the company ever since. Long before Western boardrooms began debating stakeholder capitalism, Japanese merchants had already answered the question in a single phrase.
Moving From Linear To Circular
For two centuries we have run a linear economy model: take, make, waste. We dig up metals, build products, use them briefly, and then bury them in landfills.
Electronics are among the worst examples of this bad practice. The world generated roughly 137 billion pounds of e-waste in 2025, and less than a quarter of it was documented as properly recycled. Unfortunately, the rest of these electronics, which are loaded with critical minerals such as gold and copper and rare earth magnets, were lost forever.
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A circular economy keeps those critical materials in use. It requires laws, infrastructure, capital and innovative entrepreneurs. Above all, it requires a culture in which consumers, companies and governments accept responsibility for what happens after the sale.
In 2001, Japan mandated the recycling of large home appliances and, in 2013, extended recycling to small electronics. For the Tokyo 2020 Games, Japanese citizens donated their old phones and gadgets, and the Olympic and Paralympic medals were made from the recovered metals from these old electronics.
Japan is not perfect. Like most countries, it generates enormous volumes of e-waste, and it still wrestles with plastic packaging and a heavy reliance on incineration. But no country better combines the demand, the discipline, and the cultural instinct to close the loop and make it circular.
American Recycler Moves Into Japan
That is why, when ERI, America’s largest electronics recycler, chose the site of its first owned operation outside the United States, we chose Japan. Our new venture, ERI Japan, is a 50-50 partnership with ITOCHU. It was not lost on us that we found our partner in a company whose primary mission is Sampo-yoshi. I was going to Japan to teach about our approach. And now I go to learn.
Imagine American fans staying after the Super Bowl to clear their rows, broadcast across the planet. Imagine companies asking of every product they sell whether it is good for the buyer, good for the seller, and good for the society that inherits it when it breaks or comes to its end of life.
Imagine classrooms where children learn that there is no such place as "away" when you throw something away.
The world is changing how it makes, uses, and remakes things. The best guide is already in plain sight. It is time we all started turning Japanese.
John Shegerian is the Chairman and CEO of ERI, the largest fully integrated IT asset disposition (ITAD) and electronics recycling company in the United States. The views expressed are the author's own.
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