Globalization, what a concept.

Today I will be brief. Lack of sleep, lack of interest, and lack of energy are all bogging me down. Professor, I'm sorry I skipped class today. It was a difficult choice to make because I do enjoy your lectures. Speaking of lectures, tomorrow I will actually get to see one of my UMASS professors give a presentation on the author Uchida Shungiku, in Kyoto. She is also in the anthropology field, doing research in Tokyo this past academic year. I am more excited about that right now than I am globalization in Japan. One must accept their duties though, whether I like it or not.

So, what the hell happened to the Japan that fit in so well with the western ideal of the Orient? Well, it's still there. It's just trapped inside of an "onion,"; as it was so brilliantly cliched in the film: The Japanese Version, a film we viewed on Monday in class. What this means to me is that the current western concept of Japan is that it has multiple layers; I however feel this has become a stereotype no longer applicable to the culture. Therefore, I feel the true answer to this question is trapped within said "onion". With the idea of Globalization in mind, Japan is progressing just as any other country would. I feel as though Japanese citizens have a slightly better understanding of America (this being an age of the internet) than they did in 1991 when Alvarez and Kolker did their film. This does not mean that I think the Japanese have a great understanding of Occident culture, it just means they know a bit more about it than MacDonald's and Elvis.
Addressing Globalization more specifically, the term itself proposes a unified culture around the world. This means there is as little stereotyping as possible. It can never be accomplished, but much like socialism and communism it works better in theory. Anyways, Japan has been acquiring/borrowing the ideas of other cultures ever since she opened up to the rest of the world and saw how much there was to take in. Thus we are left with (in the interest of keeping this stupid joke alive)"tree", not an "onion" . A ring for every year, retaining scars, accommodating new branches, ultimately growing all the more complex. That is as complex as its history, and culture will allow.
In everyday Japan, one can see examples of this everywhere: English is used in a variety of signs and announcements. Not just this "EGO" boom, but a boom of western companies have invaded the land of the rising sun as well. Visually speaking, what I have for you today is not that profound, just interesting. It made me go "huh". Here I present to you the reader, the Japanese version of "Habitat for Humanity". I snapped this shot outside Kyoto the other weekend; they were campaigning for world peace and love. I just like it because they are Japanese hippies. The guy on the far left has adapted to the current western hippy image perfectly. That's Globalization for you (ba-dum-cha, I guess this post really did get the better of me).