1
The New Ballad of East and West
Who are these two men? Why are they famous?
Warm-up Questions
ῌWhat are some good points about Western culture? What
are some bad points?
ῌWould you like to live in another culture? If so, which
one? Why (or why not)?
“Oh, East is East and West is West,
And never the twain shall meet.”
When Englishman Rudyard Kipling used these lines
more than a century ago to begin his poem “The Ballad of
East and West,” he couldn’t possibly have imagined how
+
/
/
+*
+/
,*
wrong he would be. In Kipling’s day, traveling from London
or New York to Tokyo took many weeks, as did sending a
letter. Telephone calls couldn’t yet cross oceans, and planes,
television, and computers hadn’t even been invented. The
average Japanese probably couldn’t name any Western people, and Westerners surely knew no Japanese.
Today a Londoner or New Yorker can go out for sushi
and then watch the newest Ghibli animated feature almost as
easily as a Japanese can have a cheeseburger and catch the
latest o#ering from Hollywood. Westerners are about as
interested in Zen and kabuki as Japanese are in Shakespeare
and gardening. Actors, singers, soccer players, politicians we
all know dozens of famous English and Americans, and
Japanese such as Ichiro and Ken Watanabe are making
names for themselves overseas, too. With jets whizzing from
one hemisphere to another every day, visiting your British or
American friends has never been easier or you can simply
turn on your computer and have a video chat with them.
And it’s not only Japan. From Canada to Cambodia,
from Nepal to Norway, Asian and Western cultures are
closer than ever before, and the gap continues to narrow.
Maybe it’s time for a rewrite of Kipling:
“Oh, East was East and West was West,
But now the two are merging.”
,/
Television, movies, and the explosion in overseas travel
have all played a role in this amazing transformation, and
now the Internet is increasingly becoming an agent of
,
ῌThe
New Ballad of East and West
change, too. For some societies, the changes have come
gradually. Here in Japan, for example, each new model of
mobile phone just adds a few new features to what the
previous model could already do. It’s a gradual evolution,
and only if you compare your current phone with a three- or
four-year-old one do you see a significant di#erence. In
Bangladesh, by contrast, villages which have never had telephones of any sort are now being wired into the country’s
mobile phone system, bringing enormous change almost overnight. In even more extreme cases, when new roads are built
into remote areas, people living much as their ancestors did
in the fifteenth century are suddenly catapulted into the
twenty-first century.
Changes such as these are like Pandora’s Box: after they
come, they’re here to stay. A once-isolated village, after it’s
Jumbo jets carry thousands of people between the East and West every day.
-
/
+*
+/
/
+*
+/
,*
,/
connected to the rest of the world through roads, phone
lines, and electricity, almost certainly will never destroy that
road, cut those phone lines, turn o# the electricity, and
return to its former isolation. And when the people of that
village have discarded their traditional clothes, possessions,
and traditions in favor of what they see on television, they’re
highly unlikely ever to go back to “the old ways.”
Is this cultural globalization a good thing? The answer
depends on whom you’re asking. If a European visits Mongolia and finds the nomads watching color TVs, riding motorcycles instead of horses, and wearing T-shirts that say “New
York Mets,” he’s likely to sigh, “I wish they still lived the
way they did fifty years ago. It would be so much more
interesting.” But ask the same person whether he would like
to live in the Europe of fifty years ago, and you can be
certain of the answer: “No.” With the world changing so
quickly, even our own culture ten years ago seems primitive
compared with today. It’s fun to see and experience “the old
ways,” but at the end of the day, most of us want to come
home to the comforts of the modern world and so do
Mongolian nomads.
Theoretically, at least, cultural globalization should bring
us some benefits, the most important of which would be a
more peaceful world. As we become more similar, the possibilities for misunderstanding are reduced and with them the
conflicts that often arise from those misunderstandings.
But the price we may have to pay is a big one: the loss
of the individual cultures which make this planet such a
fascinating place. To be sure, this won’t happen overnight; it
.
ῌThe
New Ballad of East and West
might not be long from now before most people on Earth
dress similarly, but it will take far longer for them all to
think similarly. Or to put it another way, you can dress a
South African woman in a chogori and teach her Hangul, but
that won’t make her a South Korean.
What this means is that the benefits of cultural globalization might be much farther in the future than the drawbacks.
Long after the visible di#erences between people in distant
countries have vanished, the di#erences in their hearts and
minds will remain and those are the di#erences that can
cause problems.
This brings us to one of the central themes of this
textbook: if we accept that huge changes to our world can’t
be prevented, can we at least control them? We may not be
able to close Pandora’s Box, but we might be able to keep
the lid from opening too far, too quickly. Where cultural
globalization is concerned, this means trying to become
global citizens while still maintaining your Japanese heritage.
There can be no doubt that it’s a tricky balancing act, but if
we’re successful, some day we’ll be able to do another
rewrite of Kipling:
“Oh, East is East and West is West,
But they get along just fine.”
/
/
+*
+/
,*