1. When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. 

2. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. 

3. And-most crucial of all-the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas – and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. 

4. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colours and appropriates the products of another, 

5. The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. 

6. Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re travelling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa.