I was witness to a conversation this week between Japanese and Mexican colleagues who reminisced about their common experiences as teenagers in the 1990s, on opposite sides of the world, playing the same Nintendo games.   I was reminded of a conversation I had once in a shebeen (a bar) in rural Zimbabwe in about 1985 with a black Zimbabwean mathematician about the many American TV series we had both seen growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, again in different hemispheres and neither of us in North America  – Superman, Batman, Bonanza, The Mickey Mouse Club, etc.  But it was not only American culture on our TV screens across the former British empire – we had both also seen the Japanese historical action series, The Samurai, a hit phenom in both countries.