It`s blue jeans in Japan, Stevie Wonder songs in Moscow, Cubs games on television in Honduras. It`s a dude ranch in Biblical Galilee, where you can go horseback riding in the footsteps of Jesus. Or Disneyland in Tokyo, American football in Britain or fondue and schnitzel in Bangkok. It`s sushi in Sao Paulo, Brazil, or a McDonald`s practically anywhere.
It`s, to coin a term, uniculture.
Basically, uniculture just means the world is becoming more homogenized, that what you find one place is likely to turn up in another–be it something as structured as services and hours or as intangible as attitudes and lifestyles.
And where does the unistandard appear to originate? America, of course. Other cultures may influence ours: Breathes there a coffee shop, ever so humble, without French croissants? Or a city of any size without a sushi bar and a Mexican restaurant? Or a furniture store without Danish modern? But for the most part, it`s American-style fashions and food, hotel rooms and plumbing, music and architecture that are making themselves known around the globe.
This is not to say, of course, that every destination has become uniform, every traveling experience interchangeable. There still are myriad places off the beaten track where adventures are not only likely but almost certain, and you never, ever feel as if you could be waking up in Chicago. Sometimes all it takes is leaving a big international city and driving a few miles into the surrounding countryside. Or maybe just something as simple as checking out of the international-class hotels–which pride themselves on standardized services–and into family-run pensiones.
Other times you have to strike off for less-frequented destinations, such as Burma, where you still can`t even get a Coke. And in some areas, such as China, you may be able to order, say, an American-style breakfast, but that in no way diminishes the staggering cultural experiences and differences waiting outside your hotel.
A survey of Tribune correspondents around the world shows that although the overall trend may be toward uniculture, if you are determined and resourceful, the unknown can still be discovered.
For example, Vincent Schodolski, The Tribune`s Latin American correspondent, agrees that there are many superficial similarities apparent as one travels from country to country in his region, but it`s not necessary to march off into a rain forest to find a truly different culture.
For the American who wants to feel as if he never left home, most of the major hotels in Central America and Mexico have a full range of cable televison delivered by satellite. The traveler can gorge on programs ranging from ”Dallas” and ”Falcon Crest” to the ”CBS Morning News” and
”Masterpiece Theater.”
Music Television (MTV) allows passengers at the San Salvador airport to enjoy Cyndi Lauper and all the rest while awaiting flights out of the war-torn country. There is a bar in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with a satellite dish on the roof, that shows NFL games live every weekend during the season. U.S. servicemen on duty in Honduras are its main customers.
Mexican, Salvadoran and Guatemalan shopping centers resemble those along many commercial strips in the U.S. Mexico City recently has been blessed, if that`s the appropriate word, with scores of cookie shops like dotting the Loop.
Nonetheless, you can drive 10 minutes from most of these uniculture establishments and find the Third World staring you in the face–be it donkey and oxcarts pulling everything from people to sacks of corn, as in Managua, or a thousand people living in a garbage dump in Guatemala City.
As the Nicaraguan government became more and more in need of dollars, it opened a ”dollar store,” just like those in Eastern Europe. While much of the city is living on overpriced rice and beans and hoping for a bit of meat once a week, people with dollars can buy everything from Cabbage Patch dolls to Hebrew National Salami to $40 bottles of champagne to compact disc players and the discs to go with them.
Even McDonald`s, one of the more ubiquitous symbols of uniculture, had to make some accommodations to account for local problems in Managua. Because the government does not have enough foreign currency to import paper cups, the eatery serves soft drinks in plastic bags.
Uniculture`s progress is not always easy. Mexico City finally got its one and only McDonald`s after prolonged negotiations with the government, which is extremely sensitive about the popularity of American ways with some of its citizens.
A few days after the fast-food outlet opened, using college students as part-time workers, a major union closed the place down, saying the company was exploiting youthful nonunion workers.
Often the universal and the local cultures get what amounts to equal billing. You can get bacon and eggs in the Camino Real hotel chain in Mexico, for example, but on the same menu are tamales, refried beans and a variety of tropical fruits that you don`t normally encounter outside the region.
And on the subject of eating, Mexicans–unlike many Italians and Spaniards–have not chosen to shelve siesta closings in favor of the more standardized 9 to 5 workday with a one-hour lunch break. In Mexico City, offices open between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., lunch starts at 3 p.m. and lasts about 2 1/2 hours, and you can still find people in their offices at 8 p.m.
Europe, where lifestyles and service standards are already similar to ours, is a prime candidate for uniculture. Most traveling Americans doubtless feel more at home there than in the Third World. You can always get a shrimp cocktail and steak in Europe (rechristened ”continental fare”). Hotels are being remodeled so that most rooms now come with bath–eliminating that long walk down the hall. Many even come with television sets, and a few offer VCRs. Working hours in Europe tend to be the same as ours, and many cityscapes are starting to look the same.
Ray Moseley, The Tribune`s London correspondent, who has lived in and covered Europe for more than two decades, recounts:
Almost 25 years ago, I frequented a marvelous restaurant in the Trastevere district of Rome that specialized in fish. It is called Sabatini. Even though it is located on one of the most beautiful piazzas in Rome, it was in those days largely unknown to the tourist trade. Then Sabatini got into the guidebooks. In no time at all, buses were pulling up outside, disgorging groups of American tourists. The restaurant brought in musicians to play at the tables, and it started to serve cocktails. The waiters learned to speak English. And the prices went up accordingly. Sabatini hasn`t been the same since.
What happened to Sabatini accounts for the fact that such temples of French cuisine as Taillevent, Tour d`Argent and Paul Bocuse recently started limiting the number of reservations they are willing to accept from Americans or other foreigners. Although this may seem outrageous to those who are turned away, the restaurants are, understandably, trying rather desperately to retain their French character. Lower the floodgates, they feel, and it may be only a matter of time before they have diners demanding to know why hamburgers are not on the menu.
In other areas, the drive toward cultural uniformity is moving ahead. Britain, in particular, has taken on a more American flavor since I arrived there in 1981, some pubs fixing themselves up to look like American bars, Englishmen switching from their traditional warm beer to lagers, and American football becoming a popular sport both on the playing field and on television. Everywhere Europeans spend much of their evening time watching American TV programs, many of them tailored to promote a taste for American lifestyles.
American English has become not just Europe`s but the world`s lingua franca, so much so that French Culture Minister Jack Lang frets constantly over its erosion of the French tongue.
National distinctions have not all been blurred, of course. An English afternoon tea is still an English afternoon tea (if you avoid hotels like the Ritz in London, where it is served by Italian waiters in an atmosphere that is anything but English and at prices that can bring on acute indigestion). The city centers of Paris, Rome, Florence and, above all, Venice, retain their unique architectural character. But vast areas of London, Brussels and scores of other European cities have been despoiled by modern architecture, distinguishable from the American variety only by the shoddiness of the building materials used by European cost-cutters.
Even so, indigenous cultures are intact in Europe, and the more adventurous travelers have no difficulty in finding them. They avoid hotel dining rooms and fast-food outlets and seek out authentic national cuisine, which is not hard to find. They may join the swarming crowds in the great museums, but they also know how to find the artistic and archeological treasures tucked away in churches and palaces that are off the beaten tourist track. They pass up the big international hotel chains and light in charming little hostelries with distinctive decor.
Frequent travelers, of course, tend to know all this; it is the first-time visitor who is apt to play it safe and thus go back home feeling as though he has never been away. The essential thing is to get off the tour bus and try walking–or driving. Travel then becomes a voyage of personal discovery.
Going out of the big cities, of course, is the best way to experience a different kind of culture. Get off the superhighways that skirt the towns and travel on the back roads. There are countless rural hotels in Europe, many of them centuries old and some housed in former castles or stately homes, that will leave you in no doubt you are not in a Hilton or a Sheraton and not in rural Illinois or Texas.
You can go into Tuscan hill towns, the Dordogne Valley in France or villages in Spain where you will rarely hear English spoken, never encounter a Burger King, never feel a sense of familiarity. You may rent a villa in many of these places and learn to fend for yourself, living as the local people do. You will find people attuned to a slower pace of life, still observing siestas, and if you venture into the really remote crannies of Europe, such as outlying parts of Sicily and mountain villages in Greece, you will find some who hardly seem to belong to the modern world. These are people who have seldom traveled outside their natal villages, who live by ancient
superstitions, who speak dialects their own city-bred countrymen can hardly understand and who view outsiders with mistrust.”
Japan and some other parts of Asia, once among the most exotic destinations of the world, appear to be among those most susceptible to the uniculture influence and most eager to embrace Western styles and customs. From Tokyo`s Disneyland to Superbowl Monday to bagels for breakfast, it can seem familiar territory to the visiting American.
Ronald E. Yates, The Tribune`s chief Asia correspondent, who was the paper`s correspondent in Asia from 1974-76 and who returned last year to reopen the Tokyo bureau, reports:
In an affluent suburb west of downtown Tokyo, Japan`s 500th McDonald`s restaurant opened five months ago–a streamlined two-story hamburger palace complete with drive-thru windows and candy-striped high-school students trained to take your order in Japanese or English.
Less than 200 yards down the street, a busy boulevard known as Kampachi-dori, sits a Denny`s and two other expansive American-style restaurants called Yesterday and Preston Wood that look as if they were airlifted, complete with palms and hanging plants, from Southern California.
A little farther on is a collection of two dozen model homes that are as architecturally foreign to Japan as igloos in India. On weekends crowds of young Japanese couples parade through the stucco renditions of classic Cape Cods, Spanish adobes, New England farms and Western ranches.
Within a half-mile of this Tokyo-Americascape are a Kentucky Fried Chicken, two Pizza Huts, a Shakeys, a Mr. Donut, a Baskin-Robbins and a German delicatessen–not to mention Tokyo`s first indoor shopping mall, a bowling alley, a golf course and, yes, two fitness centers.
These trappings of American suburbia are not the remnants of the U.S. exhibit at Japan`s Expo `85. They are symbolic of Tokyo 1986–a city, like many other Asian capitals, that finds itself becoming increasingly Western in flavor and fervor.
From Tokyo to Thailand, from Singapore to Seoul, Western culture, with a decidedly American flavor, is rapidly eradicating the essence of Asia–its unparalleled diversity, its Oriental mien, its mystery.
In Japan, a woman in a full-fledged kimono, the native dress for women, is enough to make even the Japanese stop and stare. In Singapore, where Joseph Conrad and William Somerset Maugham penned their way to immortality from the alabaster confines of the ancient Raffles Hotel, the government is
relentlessly ripping down the past in favor of a city that looks more and more like Chicago instead of the intriguing tropical sprawl that it once was.
Seoul, which 10 years ago was still a distinctly Korean city, is looking more and more like a combination of Minneapolis and Seattle. Bangkok, which last spring christened its first McDonald`s, persists in transforming itself into a tropical blend of Munich, Amsterdam and Zurich, complete with beer gardens, Schnapps bars and restaurants filled with fondue and schnitzel as it goes about the business of attracting European tourists.
In the search for the future, we are losing sight of our past,” laments Vichai Phiromsawat, a Bangkok sociologist. ”We are being lured away from our culture to a new one that offers blue jeans, hamburgers, rock and roll and designer clothes. It is not Thai, and it is not entirely Western. It is Amer- Asian. How can I make Americans understand this? Well, picture Bruce Springsteen in a kimono playing a Burmese harp, and you have an idea of what`s happening today in Asia.”
Indeed, the Asia of 1986 is about as close to the Asia of 1946 as Springsteen`s music is to that played during a Japanese tea ceremony. Today`s Asia is coalesced, computerized, and convenient like never before. Cities like Singapore and Tokyo hum with efficiency. Seoul and Taipei have grown from meager metropolises into capitals of captitalism. They bristle with Holiday Inns, Hyatts and other Western-style hotels all offering the kind of standardized Western comforts that Americans, Europeans and Asians have come to expect worldwide–health clubs, discos, coffee shops and English-speaking staffs.
