Pop-ositions

One of my group’s pop-ositions was as follows: “Globalization didn’t necessarily work because the cultural exchange was mostly one-sided, as one culture was sort of overriding the other.”

To this effect, American culture has a habit of trying to take over other cultures without necessarily allowing for them to point out whether or not you’re doing it when when you take on these aspects of other things. Early on in the class, a friend of mine told me that Korean food was one of the only Asian foods that had not been changed upon being brought to the United States, because many of the others didn’t actually suit the American palette. Upon doing a little research, this seems pretty universal in American misunderstanding. I looked up a few popular English recipe sites, and though many of them had quite a few useful posts, most of the “Asian” recipes were variations of the same American way it’s done.

This can be seen in a number of other ways as well. As a child I was a huge fan of the Pokemon cartoon series, and I still play the video games. But there were multiple situations in which they changed things in the series, simply because they weren’t American. One that I found distinctly strange even as a child was the overwriting of onigiri in one of the episodes. I had no idea what it actually was at the time; I had no experience with much of anything Japanese outside of Sailor Moon. But in the episode they referred to the onigiri as a sandwich. My brother and I kind of looked at each other, and we wondered out loud if either of us had ever seen a sandwich that looked like that before. Naturally, we hadn’t. But, being young and having short attention spans, we thought nothing of it until years later. Often times, much like what’s done with history, things that are thought of as strange or inconvenient for a certain target area are simply written out.