Cultural Globalization

In 1971, the first McDonald's in Japan opened in the Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo's Ginza district. The company expected modest results. Within a year, it was the highest-grossing McDonald's outlet on Earth. By 2024, Japan had over 3,000 locations serving teriyaki burgers, shrimp filet sandwiches, and green tea McFlurries. Not one of these items appeared on the American menu.

This small fact contains the entire debate over cultural globalization. A product originating in one country spreads worldwide, raising fears that local culture will be swallowed whole. Then the local culture swallows the product instead, reshaping it into something the original creators never imagined. The teriyaki burger is neither purely American nor purely Japanese. It exists in the space between, and that space has become the defining territory of twenty-first-century culture.

The movement of music, film, food, fashion, and ideas across borders is not new. Silk Road merchants carried Buddhist art into China two thousand years ago. What changed in the late twentieth century was speed, volume, and reach. Satellite television, container shipping, the internet, and social media compressed the timeline from centuries to months. A song recorded in Seoul can reach 100 million listeners in Jakarta, São Paulo, and Lagos before most people in the artist's home neighborhood have heard it.