From West to East and East to West

Whether Cultural imperialism is taking place or not is difficult to determine. As we talked in the class this week, we cannot make such a sweeping statement that western or American culture including things like Macdonald and Starbucks is imperializing the local, native culture because we can see the localization in the westernization.

When we think of cultural imperialism, we associate it with westernization, so called Macdonaldization. It is true that American culture including Starbucks, Macdonald, music, films, etc has spread all over the world and changed the local culture.
But the local culture is not simply imperialized; they accepted those American culture because they would help their local culture and society to develop. For example, in Japan, after fast food and convenience store like Seven Eleven came, people's diet changes a lot and many people started to be worried about teenagers' health who consumed fast food and food from convenience stores a lot. But also they improved our society too. Because of those food, women have become able to go outside home and work and people have more time to spend in anything else rather than cooking by themselves.
And importation of a culture is not only one - way thing any more. Today many western countries including America embrace eastern cultures.
Hollywood remake more and more Chinese, Korean, Japanese movies. As for Japanese culture, many countries share Japanese animation and it is surprising that now many people all over the world know the animation I grew up with. Also, Japanese electronic devices are used worldwide today. I am pretty sure that the digital cameras that almost all tourists in NYC from many countries are from Japan like CANNON, NIKON, and RICOH. And video games might change teenagers' life a lot. And most of the video games are also from Japan, like Wii, DS, Play Station.

Today,considering other imported cultures in our culture, I feel that it is not imperialization we just accept them because they are needed for our culture and by importing other culture and make them our own by fitting them in our own local culture, our culture and society has been industrialized and developed.