Cultural Staples Reinvented on the Other Side of the World

They say there’s nothing new under the sun, but sometimes the key to innovation isn’t finding something completely new, but instead taking a foreign idea and working it to fit your needs. Today we’re looking at those cultural creations that have jumped national borders and found new forms across the globe.

Games

Wherever humans go on this planet, we always manage to find a way to entertain ourselves. There are multiple board and table games that have thousands of years of history and have travelled across the world, changing in small ways as they moved. Then there are games like Pachinko, a popular gambling game from Japan that was adapted wholesale as Plinko by an American game show and then spread to versions like the online Plinko Go in the UK and across Europe. Both games involve dropping balls from the top of the board and aiming for the boxes or cups at the bottom, but Pachinko typically uses 11mm steel balls with a set number of brass pins in the playing field. The online version, Plinko Go, features small red balls and allows you to change the size of the board and number of paylines to either 8, 10, 12, or 14. 

Source: Unsplash

Probably the most interesting case is the king of board games, chess. The game as we know it now is a European variation, but historians have traced it back to a game known as chaturanga from India around 1,500 year ago. Most fascinating is that the game evolved in two separate directions, also having versions in China and the still-popular Japanese game of shogi.

Sports

Alongside other games, sport is one of the easiest cultural things in the world to translate. Ball sports in particular seem to travel extremely well, and naturally the first thing everyone thinks of as a universal sport is soccer, known globally as football and present in just about every country in the world. After all, the only things you need to play are a ball and some objects to mark two goals.

What is perhaps more surprising is where another major ball sport has ended up. Most know that rugby is a particularly popular sport in places like Australia and New Zealand, but few realize just how much of a sport it has become in the relatively nearby Japan. Apart from the standard rules, there is a growing version known as Tambo Rugby, an unusual variant played in muddy rice paddies

TV and Film

It’s something of a long-running inside joke in the TV world that, more often than not, show concepts are less created and more borrowed from other parts of the world. Some of the biggest global shows originate from a single source, like the Big Brother reality show which was copied to America from the UK, but originally taken to the UK from a Dutch show with the same concept.

One high profile project that many don’t even realize is an adaptation is this time an export from Japan instead of an import. Enthusiasts of the Western movie genre will no doubt know The Magnificent Seven, either the 1960 film or the 2016 remake. In this case, the film is a Western adaptation of Seven Samurai, an epic from legendary director Akira Kurosawa. 

With all of the cultural exchanges happening around the world all the time, this is naturally just a small part of a much wider topic. Just keep an eye out for the things all around you that may have travelled further than you think to reach you.

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