Posted on 03/10/2002 9:27:59 AM PST by xsysmgr
| BRITAIN has launched a campaign to reassure the Japanese that English football fans preparing to visit their country for the World Cup are not all hooligans bent on mayhem. Nevertheless, Japanese police are building new cells in time for an influx of troublemakers, most of whom are expected to come from England. Some police will have special “net guns” to halt hooliganism. British Embassy staff and Football Supporters Association (FSA) representatives will be joining forces in coming weeks to calm nerves in the three cities where England are to play first round matches in three month’s time. They want in particular to persuade the Japanese to differentiate between rowdy behaviour and mindless thuggery. In Osaka, where England play Nigeria on June 12, they will seek to calm merchants near the Nagai Stadium, who are planning to board up their shops. In Saitama, where England meet Sweden on June 2, and Sapporo, the venue for England’s game with Argentina on June 7, British diplomats, joined by Kevin Miles, the FSA international co-ordinator, will have their work cut out soothing local residents. Some housewives living near match venues intend to stay with relatives when England are playing. Mr Miles is arriving later this month to help to establish “fan embassies”, which will provide advice and information to England supporters. Between 5,000 and 10,000 supporters are expected to travel to Japan in June. Almost 900 convicted hooligans are banned from attending. The last serious disturbance at a sporting event in Japan was on October 22, 1933, when thousands of fans clashed at a university baseball match. And, although Japanese league football only started in 1993, there has been no significant incident since fans at a match in Yokohama hurled coins on the pitch six years ago. As a representative of English fans, Mr Miles plans to meet local people to show them what a “normal” fan looks like — and to assure them that fuurigan (football hooligans) make up only a tiny minority. “The embassy has said to him a lot of local people are concerned, and it might be that visiting them and showing he is a very normal person might help to reassure them,” Claire Allbless, an embassy press attaché, said. Shopkeepers in Osaka were horrified recently when police showed them a video of English hooligans going wild at the 1998 World Cup in France. “It was terrifying. The English get so drunk and violent,” Koji Fukushima, a shopkeeper, said. “I can’t understand why a usually respectable Englishman does this sort of thing.” Several of those at the screening decided to take out hooligan insurance for the World Cup. An insurance company has singled out the cities where England are playing. England — long considered a land of gentlemen by the Japanese — has become associated in their minds with hooliganism, an image British officials are finding hard to counteract. Cultural differences make their job harder. Japanese are in any case less demonstrative in public places than Westerners, and boisterous behaviour is frowned upon. The public is bound to feel shock at protruding beer bellies, shaved heads and nationalistic chants and songs. So British officials say they want to prepare the Japanese for typically exuberant behaviour that might be mistaken for something more. “I think they might be thinking of normal fans in terms of Japanese normal fans, all very polite and well-behaved and well-dressed and not drunk,” Ms Allbless said. Japanese may be shocked by the “normal behaviour of British fans”, which can be “quite rowdy” even though “it’s not criminal by any means, not what we would consider hooliganism”, she added. “But it’s still different to what the Japanese know of soccer fans.” The embassy believes its mission to educate will have succeeded “if we can reassure people and say, ‘your shops aren’t going to be vandalised if a group of six lads come in and order a drink. That’s perfectly normal, you don’t have to run away because you think they’re English’.” But police are still preparing for the worst. Special riot squads have been in training for the past two years, and in Sapporo they will be armed with 40 of the “net guns”, which shoot huge nets to disable troublemakers. In Osaka, a new police building with more than 70 cells will be commissioned by June 12, when the city braces for the invasion. |
What a reputation to have to deal with.
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