Fish fingers, euphoniums and sumo wrestlers... England's supporters do their country proud

Even viewed through Japanese eyes, the eight members of the Official England Supporters' Band do not obviously present a threat to public order. Bram Benton, the band's oldest musician, is 76; the others are gentle, softly spoken types encumbered with shiny brass instruments. They pump out the renditions of "Rule Britannia" and "The Great Escape" which are taken up at international games by the chanting crowd. They haven't missed an England match since 1996. But the England-Sweden game at Saitama stadium yesterday was very nearly the first. To the Japanese security, Ian Bamforth's trombone and Chris Hancock's euphonium were more than musical instruments – they were offensive weapons.

"These are worth thousands of quid," said the band leader, John Hemmingham. "Do they really think we're going to start hitting someone with them?" But, according to the Japan World Cup organising committee's rules, "objects which may be used as weapons" are not admitted to the ground. It took two hours of negotiation, and the intervention of the Football Association and the British embassy, before the menacing minstrels were finally allowed inside to watch the game.

"We ask for your kind co-operation," said a policeman at the entrance to Saitama stadium. "We are regulating the crowd." He could say that again. Never has an England football crowd been so regulated. If Japan does one thing better than any other nation, it is regulating. And yet, despite all the fears of hooliganism and disorder, England fans submitted to Japanese regulation with patience, good humour, and – more or less – kind co-operation.

It began at the entrance to the ground, a magnificent stadium which sits like a newly landed UFO in an empty area of paddy fields and vegetable patches an hour north of Tokyo. On the way into the ground were traffic lights – not for cars, but for pedestrians. Lines of armed police stood behind them, just in case anyone tried to jump the signal.

Nobody did. Inside was a giddy stretch of at least 200 yards of path without any police at all, before the gates to the stadium itself. A constant chatter of loudspeaker announcements invited fans to submit to the metal detector and body checks that are a condition of entry. The obvious hazards, such as blades, fireworks and poisons, are banned, along with alcohol and irritants such as laser pens. But – more puzzlingly – so are "frozen substances", and printed material "likely to bring to mind political, ideological or religious doctrines, assertions or concepts". Japan is proud that it has never experienced acts of terrorism by frozen fish finger-throwing, euphonium-wielding Jehovah's Witnesses – and it intends to keep it that way.

Once you get used to it, being regulated becomes surreally pleasurable. At the entrance to the ground, journalists have their passes examined by police. The passes bear a bar code which is scanned like groceries in a supermarket. The passholder's details – including, one assumes, any previous trombone convictions – flash up on a little screen. But not all the guards and police have bar-code readers. Those without are reduced to saluting everyone within range. Having saluted all the occupants of the VIP boxes they began to salute journalists. It seemed only polite to salute back.

Regulation has its victims, of course, and stories of infuriating inflexibility trickle out hour by hour. One old Japanese man, walking painfully with a stick, asked if he could take a short cut to his seat. But short cuts are not allowed, and he had to limp the long way like everyone else. And when a Canadian couple arrived at the ground in Sapporo with two tickets, only the husband was allowed in. The wife was forced to watch the game on television because she did not have a separate ticket for their eight-month-old baby.

Such mean-minded inflexibility was all the more absurd given what some people were getting away with. For months, Fifa, the Japanese organising committee and the police have been warning about the punishments ticket touts will face – and on Saturday, a British man was arrested for touting at the Ireland-Cameroon game in Niigata. But yesterday, tickets were being bought and sold under the eyes of the indifferent authorities.

A friend of mine telephoned Fifa in Tokyo to ask about last-minute tickets, and was advised by international soccer's governing body to go to a tout. At Urawa-Misono station, where the subway from Tokyo comes in, Swedes, Britons and Japanese held up pieces of cardboard with pleading messages. "Prease [sic] ticket," was the most heart-wrenching.

Japan proudly declared weeks ago that most of its matches were sold out, but more than 10,000 of the Saitama's 63,700 seats were unoccupied yesterday. This may partly be because of delays in delivery by Byrom, the British printer of the tickets, but it seems also to be a result of Japanese anxieties about keeping rival fans segregated. "They are so much concerned with security and control that they end up with vast swathes of empty seats," said Kevin Miles of Britain's Football Supporters' Association.

No one I met was having a miserable time, though, and even with all the regulation some notable objects got inside the stadium. One England fan had a 20-times-actual-size model of the World Cup, and some Swedes carried a cardboard cut-out of the turncoat Sven Goran Eriksson lynched with a Sweden scarf. But the match was notable for the warmth and affection, particularly by Japanese connoisseurs of the obscurer reaches of English football.

Messrs Suzuki, Inoue and Chiba are founders of the Japan Chesterfield FC Fan Club. The club has two other members, and they all travel to Britain several times a year to follow the fortunes of the Second Division club. "Very expensive," Mr Suzuki agreed. "But very enjoyable." "It's a bit sad," said John Leeming, a Chesterfield fan at Saitama. "There are now more Chesterfield fans in Tokyo than there are in Chesterfield."

Some 10,000 England fans were at the match, and a few thousand Swedes. The mass – some 40,000 – were Japanese. Among them was a most distinguished figure, Takanonami, a former sumo champion. Their build makes it hard for sumo wrestlers to go incognito, and Takanonami did not even try. He strode into the stadium in his cotton kimono, with his hair tied in the traditional top-knot. A group of England supporters accosted him and before long one of Japan's foremost athletes was being honoured with football's most sacred chant:

"One Takanonami! There's only one Takanonami! One Takanononaaaaaami! There's only one Takanonami!" The man mountain blushed, giggled, and ran in the opposite direction as if someone was chasing him armed with a tuba.