We recently sent some of our clients an autographed copy of Daniel Pink’s new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need.

The book is being reported as the first US business title written in the manga style, and as such, we thought it was a nice little artifact that shows how cultural flows work. We’ve talked before about cultural flows, first as part of our Top 20 Trends series and more recently on the blog with posts like this one on the opening of Guatemalan chicken joints in Shanghai. We've also specifically discussed manga as a cultural flow.

We view cultural flows as important indicators of the emerging future. The case of the Johnny Bunko book shows how manga has grown in popularity, spread to different parts of the world, and now even infiltrated the world of American business books. What's next for the future? Classic literature? No, wait...the BBC reports they've already done that.

In any case, we thought ChangeWaves readers might also enjoy seeing what it looks like when manga mixes with Pink’s unique take on “six essential lessons for thriving in the world of work,” so check out some sample pages and the books' entertaining ad on YouTube above.

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New briefs are available to subscribers to Social Technologies' Global Lifestyles project:

GL-2008-7: Indian Values
Hundreds of millions of Indians are growing up with new exposure to urban and Western cultural flows. As a result, many are shifting away from traditional values emphasizing spiritualism, austerity, and filial obedience—and looking instead to Western values of materialism, independence, and gender equality.

GL-2008-5: Bottom of the Pyramid in India
Bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) consumers—those with less than $3,000 in annual purchasing power—comprise 95% of India’s population. In aggregate, India’s BOP consumers control $1.2 trillion in purchasing power. The brief discusses this vast underserved market and analyzes nine sectors where BOP consumers play a major role.

GL-2008-2: Culture and Change
Two sets of forces shape every society’s relationship to change: economic growth pushes change forward, while local culture molds the society’s unique responses to change. Awareness of this dynamic can help organizations understand how consumer values around the world are likely to evolve in the coming years.

A superhero Vishnu fighting bad guys on city streets? Monkey god Hanuman reincarnated as a soccer playing, evil-fighting youngster? It’s the latest craze in Indian entertainment: “mytho-cartoons,” cartoons that borrow from Hindu mythology to entertain as well as teach Indian youth about Hinduism.

There is an unusual cultural exchange present in Indian mytho-cartoons: Indian animators are borrowing from Western entertainment to tell centuries old Hindu myths in a new and innovative way. Many popular mytho-cartoons use the concept of the modern comic book superhero to portray Hindu gods to Indian kids. Mytho-cartoons are becoming so popular that production companies, such as Percept Picture Company, which produces the popular “Hanuman” films, have plans to release their films and TV shows in the US and Europe, completing a cyclical cultural exchange of ideas and beliefs.

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Yiwu's International Trade CitySHANGHAI--Last week I went with my friend Zoran to Yiwu, a city about 2 hours southwest of Shanghai via bullet train. With a population of over 600,000, Yiwu has grown into a massive wholesale trading center in recent years. On the outskirts of town is the International Trade City, a mall that dwarfs Mall of America’s paltry 4.2 million square feet. Its 30,000 stores are spread over 18 million square feet and divided into sections—toys, sporting goods, computer parts, zippers, etc.—and each section has row after row, floor after floor of shops showcasing wholesale products. Zoran was looking for unique spiral bound notebooks to sell in his three bookstores in Macedonia, and we spent the better part of two hours in the morning trolling the paper and stationery section for good finds.

The real reason I went to Yiwu, though, is closely related to trading, but far more relevant to global trends. After I left the wholesale market, I hopped on the back of a motorcycle and zipped across town to a rapidly growing Muslim neighborhood. Yiwu is becoming a draw for immigrants. The small Middle Eastern community there is comprised mostly of traders, though some are setting up restaurants and other services.

This is something new for modern China, and a potentially good indicator of future change. I wouldn’t bet the farm that China will become an immigration magnet to rival the United States anytime soon, but the country has not traditionally been a destination for migrants. How it handles this new role will be something worth keeping an eye on.

An Iraqi restaurant in Yiwu, ChinaAfter I agreed to visit Yiwu with Zoran, based on his descriptions of the thriving Muslim community, I discovered that Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha beat me there by about three weeks. In her article, Cha reported that an estimated 20,000 Muslim immigrants have settled in Yiwu since 2002, including about 1,000 Iraqis looking to escape conditions in their war-torn country.

These numbers are miniscule in the grand scheme of things, but the feeling among some of the recent migrants is that there are better opportunities in China than elsewhere, including the United States. One imam (religious leader) quoted in Cha’s article noted that his congregation has grown from 100 in 2001 to 8,000 in 2007, adding of the new migrants, “The main feeling is that they are free here. People are buying apartments and cars. They want to live here for good.”

The Al-Arabi Restaurant in Yiwu, ChinaAs I drank tea and ate hummus and babaganoush in the Al-Arabi restaurant, the manager watched an Iraqi soap opera that spliced real war footage into its melodrama. I couldn’t help but wonder about the future of US soft power and whether it will ebb as China’s flows, or whether there will be room for both on the world stage in 50 years.

Images: Social Technologies

Image: EverJean (Flickr)This month's Wired magazine features a cover story on the influence of manga (Japanese comics) in the US. Japanese cultural exports like anime (Japanese animation), and manga have been gaining global appeal for many years now, but I was particularly struck by a short article documenting new uses of manga in Western cultures. Businesses outside of Japan are creating original manga for advertising, international development, and SAT prep. Celebrities, including Avril Lavigne, are even being featured as characters in manga, while publishing houses are increasingly supporting non-Japanese manga.

The culture surrounding manga in Japan is not limited to youth in the same way it is in the West--in Japan, even bureaucrats are obsessed. Kids, teens, and businessmen can all be spotted reading comics on Tokyo's metro system, and the topics can range from giant robots and magical school girls to serious discourse on Japanese politics and history. Now it seems the West may follow in Japan's footsteps. The author of the Wired article, Daniel Pink, recently told the New York Times that he is going to be publishing his own manga oriented towards a business audience.

Perhaps manga will grow up in the West alongside its audience, and we'll all be able to read about the latest political scandal as drawn by our favorite manga-ka (manga artist). Regardless of manga's future in the US, its emergence points to continued cultural flows from Japan to the West.

Cornfed1975 (Flickr)We like to keep an eye on cultural flows as drivers of change in the world, so when a Guatemalan fast-food joint opened up in Shanghai, we took notice. Pollo Campero opened a branch in the heart of downtown Shanghai this summer, presumably in an effort to get a toehold in the Asian market and raise brand consciousness, and not, at this point, in order to challenge the unquestioned primacy of KFC in the Chinese quick service food arena. Pollo Campero has had success in the United States eroding KFC’s market because of its appeal to the large and growing Hispanic population and its willingness to regionalize its offerings. China, without much of an Hispanic population, is another matter. They also have a store in Indonesia, where KFC is equally well established. Both the China and the Indonesia presence are part of an aggressive expansion plan to roll out 500 new restaurants around the world by 2012.

We talk a lot about cultural flows at S)T -- the trend of one society's cultural artifacts and habits making their way into other cultures and societies via the currents of trade, media, and immigration, often emerging transformed by the lens of the receiving culture. Bollywood, J-pop, Islamization, for instance.

Now the government of India is looking to redress what it sees at the downside to cultural flows. As reported by several media outlets this week, Indian ministers are angry at how a fundamental part of Indian spiritual culture, yoga, is the subject of thousands of patents, trademarks and other various intellectual property protections issued by the US government and others. According to one story, these protections add up to more than $3 billion in value in the US alone. For writer Suketu Mehta, who penned the original piece in the International Herald Tribune, the problem is greater than just yoga. Mehta points to the billions of dollars Western pharmaceutical companies make from advances first discovered in developing countries -- either recently or as the foundation of traditional medicine -- as another example of what he sees as cultural appropriation.

As far as the yoga issue goes, the Indian government is setting up databases of traditional knowledge to make its sources more transparent to foreign patent authorities. While this won't stop the "flow," and arguably might increase it, the action is an early indicator of steps likely to be taken as more tradition-minded cultures open their doors to the world. The question of whether culture is truly "open source" and open to being remixed or simply relabeled is likely to be more closely deconstructed as we wade more deeply into the next decade of globalization.

(Image: Scott Smith) 

It’s fascinating to watch the process of assimilation unfold. As the Hispanic population in America rapidly increases, not only are the Hispanics becoming more “American,” but Americans are becoming more Hispanic.

Some examples found in researching and writing a Global Lifestyles brief on American Rites of Passage:

• When I was growing up, our birthday parties had maybe a treasure hunt or other games. Now you can’t have a party for a young kid without stringing the piñata up in the backyard and letting everybody have a whack at it.
• People are putting up memorial tableaus along highways and roads all over the US. This began as a Mexican Catholic tradition and gradually spread from the Southwest across the country. Now they’re everywhere. In my town (in northern New Jersey), we had one up for three months after a crossing guard was killed by a car last fall.
• Quinceañera—the Latin American celebration of a girl's 15th birthday—is joining the Sweet Sixteen party as a teen rite. Now it’s gone mainstream and you can find quinceañera stickers on crafts sites like Creative Memories. A colleague even sent me a link to a magazine called Quince Girl—a planning and fashion guide for quinceañera that seems to be almost entirely in English, showing assimilation in action. 

We’re going to see more and more crossover of this kind of ethnic rite of passage in the years to come, and the rites will be Americanized in the process—a process that keeps American culture constantly evolving. (Image: sxc.hu)