by Yumie Kitamura

In recent decades, globalization has become so common around the world at an unprecedented speed.

Owing to high-tech, we can keep in touch with people all over the world. While I lived in San Francisco last year, I talked over skype with my family and friends every night, and now living here in Japan, I enjoy skyping with my friends in US. No matter how far we live, we can chat and talk anytime as long it is good time for us. We talk about everything happened to our current lives and laugh about it, as if we are really talking face to face. I really feel technology keeping us close.

I also enjoy shopping online. Most of stores in US currently started shipping products to Japan with low shipping fee. So I can easily order Marc Jacobs bag online at home and receive it from US a few days later.

This is when I feel globalization in my real life, and as far as that is all, this globalization seems so great and I love it. But in fact, this enormous phenomenon seems to be very difficult and complicated issue. While I appreciate the fruit of globalization, I also have some questions: Is globalization really all good for us?

Because no need to say, globalization is not something happening only online. It actually is happening right in our local towns too. Let’s take a Bangalore’s model for an example. Bangalore, the high-tech city in India, is planned to become an unbelievably gorgeous, modernistic high-tech city in near future. In the model picture of how the city is going to be, you could never tell the city in actually built in India. Because, the city just looks like some gorgeous ideal city in Europe or someplace. If this is how Bangalore is globalizing, it seems to me it’s the same as homogenizing into some modernistic, conventional European-looking city, eventually losing its beautiful originality and local charm.