Diffusion on the Tokyu Line

I’m on a Milan Kundera kick, so on the train into Shibuya I sat reading “Of Laughter and Forgetting” while wearing Turkish earrings and drinking ostensibly Kenyan coffee. Our lives are full of these moments, but every now and then it hits me again how recent this all is. I think we underestimate the “first wave” of globalization and the long-standing trade network across Asia through the silkroad and the amount of trade across the Indian ocean, but I don’t think so many things were ever this casually integrated before.

I used to rhapsodize about this in high school. I thought cultural diffusion and globalization boiled down to New York City girls in Chinese embroidered flats and Indian bracelets eating Mexican food (like many, I left Africa out of my global daydream at the time), a fusion that was sure to spread ever outwards. (Giuliani assures me NYC is a microcosm the world—or at least the country.) Intellectually, all I can stick with from this is I think we too often characterize cultural globalization as the spread of Western products and images, when in fact there’s more multi-dimensional integration.

Also, of course, looking at the integration of consumer products as the hallmark of globalization is cheap. Trade exists without equal power relations, and an exchange of goods doesn’t necessarily lead to an exchange of ideas. (Theory: if there’s trade between two relatively equal countries, there has to be an exchange of ideas. Case in point: corporate reorganization and assessment in the US and Japan. Maybe the difference lies in competing corporations in two counties versus trade through a multinational corporation.)

At any rate, even if we shouldn’t draw too many conculsions about the state of the world from one American girl’s reading material and jewelry and coffee on the Tokyo subway, it is a fairly new and growing snapshot. It also makes me so happy to be living in this era.