鷹揚空

Today is my team presentation whose topic is introduction of cultural differences between America, Japan and Taiwan through McDonald's. My part was to introduce McDonald's in America. There are many characters created by McDonald's. Actually, McDonald's worked with Disney before ,so in our childhood we could see a lot of Disney toys in Happy Meals. However, after Disney dumped McDonald's, McDonal's started to work with other business. For example, Mario Brothers come from Japan. Thus, even in the U.S. there is a Japanese cultural diffusion. Next, it's the food. Bagels are Ameirca. But the point I'd like to say is that most of the time the American menu of McDonald's often put emphasis on their meat of burgers. This is kind of different from Taiwan and Japan. Let's go back to the 1970's of America. I found two ads on the Internet, but actually they are the same because the words on them are exactly the same. Why McDonald's made two different versions of the ad? Obviously, one is for the black and the other is for the white. I did a little bit research online. Though desegregation and civil right movements had risen at that time, perhaps there might be a quite strong concept of racial segregation. So, perhaps this was one one of the reasons why McDonald's made two different versions of it. Here's a commercial of Great Taste of America. In fact, this commercial has different versions for different places, such New York hip pop, Amazon rock, California classic and here we have Texas cowgirls. From this video, we know that America is such a broad continent that each local place will develop its own customs, values and lifestyles. America is called a melting pot because it contains many elements, different ethnic  groups of people and different religions. This is very different from Japan, which is a homogeneous country. In addition to historical backgrounds, I think geographical factors may be one of the reasons why America features individualism and Japan features collectivism.