This article was written by Melinda Liu.

The basis of the cyberpunk literary genre is oppressive megacorporations and advanced yet dystopian cities. A subgenre of science fiction that first emerged in the 1970s, exemplified by Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner (1982) marked the genre’s first breakthrough. 

An iconic hit, the film brought cyberpunk into the world’s view, and Katsuhiro Otomo’s famous manga series AKIRA was serialized in Japan the same year. The genre has since evolved, with titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 and The Matrix.

Alongside cybernetic implants, transhumanism, mega-corporations, and sprawling neon cities, cyberpunk media has another unifying aesthetic. That being, strangely enough, Japanese and other Asian aesthetics – in particular, Japanese characters. “Features such as neons with Japanese or Chinese characters appear in many other science-fiction works of cyberpunk style, such as Blade Runner,” in addition to its heavy influence on Night City, the main setting of the 2020 video game Cyberpunk 2077, developed by CD Projekt Red. 

In particular, “Night City’s Japantown, a district that’s made up of all the cliches that you can think of and was likely influenced by Kabukicho in Tokyo,” and features “love hotels, hostess bars, ramen joints, karaoke clubs, pachinko parlours on every corner.”

One can even find a link to a defined “Neo-Tokyo,” an aesthetic and subform of Cyberpunk with a focus on 1980s Japan. The article features dozens of example pictures cast in neon glows from Japanese billboards. Asian aesthetics are so deeply intertwined with the genre of cyberpunk that a search for “cyberpunk” on Pinterest will yield background images that prominently feature Chinese and Japanese characters. 

However, it is no mistake that such aesthetics are so deeply intertwined with the cyberpunk genre. Nor is it the only way that East Asia, particularly Japan, is related to discussions of futurism and technology.

For example, claims that Japan lives in the future, often accompanied by new and flashy technologies not accessible in the West, are extremely common. A single search will yield numerous examples. Robotic toothbrushes, automated transport, “human washing machines” (a pod that cleans and dries you), and countless more dazzling inventions and technologies. Others argue that Japan is “living in the future” because of advancements in AI and robotics, bullet trains, vending machines, advanced architecture, smart toilets, and flashy fashion. In a way, Japan thus becomes an exotic foreign land with a variety of technological advancements that make life marginally easier. Because of “its bright advertising signs, robots, and high-speed trains” that fascinate tourists, “visitors often label their Instagram snapshots with captions like ‘Living in the future’ or ‘Cyberpunk city’.”

William Gibson, writing in the TIME magazine, states that “Japan seems, perpetually, the most inherently futuristic of all nations,” and “it was not that there was a cyberpunk movement in Japan or a native literature akin to cyberpunk, but that modern Japan simply was cyberpunk.” 

Given that Japanese aesthetics are deeply ingrained in the cyberpunk genre and Japan’s actual technology appears advanced, such statements may seem relatively harmless or even positive. 

In reality, such aesthetics and ideas may morph into another form of orientalism – the Western view that Eastern cultures are exotic and mysterious, but also backwards and inferior. David S. Roh, in his book “Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media,” defines techno-orientalism as “a phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse.” 

To fully understand the origins of the concept, it is important to analyze the cultural and social landscape of post-World War II Japan. First, in a Tokyo destroyed by the bombings of the war, “a small group of young architects under the guidance of their mentor, Tange Kenzō, saw ample opportunity in many of the spaces that had opened up.” 

That opportunity was a revolutionary new approach to architecture in urban spaces, named Metabolism – the reimagining of cities as “a complex living organism with a diverse set of smaller working parts that interact with one another.” “Megastructures clustered together in suffocating proximity and highways weaving between skyscrapers several hundred meters in the air” are featured prominently in Otomo’s AKIRA and even more so in later cyberpunk works, becoming synonymous with the urban dystopian genre. Although not solely responsible for the aesthetics of cyberpunk, the Japanese Metabolism movement played a prominent role.

Furthermore, at the time of the development of the cyberpunk genre, Japan was seen as a technological powerhouse. The economic output led “politicians, artists, and filmmakers to consequently turn their attention to Japan.” The attention was not just positive admiration, but also an unspoken fear that Japan’s rapid developments and advancements could soon overtake the West. It was an evolving, adapting force that was quickening. In the culture, coinciding with “the rise of companies like Sony and Nintendo in the late ’80s,” the output of this fear is the cyberpunk genre.

 In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, for example, the decidedly American city of Los Angeles features “a bustling metropolis of millions of people struggling to survive in the face of corrupt governments and conglomerates” – that heavily features “a landscape rife with Japanese soft influence (through the implementation of cultural relics such as music, consumer products, etc).” 

For example, “holographic geisha [can be seen] advertise products while main character Rick Deckard eats ramen,” and Scott himself had envisioned this hypothetical future to be “distinctly Asian, highly technological.” It is deeply symbolic of “the economic fear of the 1980s, and specifically the fear of an America that has become more Japanese than American.” 

Likewise, in the much more modern Cyberpunk 2077, “Japanese signs are littered around the city with the occasional Kanji plastered across a sign [and] NPCs (non-playable characters) sit around a Japanese food stall enjoying their sushi.” Meanwhile, Luke Johnson, writing in Asian Art and Architecture, concludes that the Japanese aesthetics of Blade Runner “captivate Western audiences with their already present fears of Japan, and [manifest] them into a cultural-existential crisis in film format.”

There is a case to be made that techno-orientalism is not all bad, in that “the envisioning of a bleak Asian future can be just that—a future that is Asian (where, for example, perhaps one might see as many signs in Chinese in the United States of America as one would English)—and also, bleak, for various reasons.” 

However, it is still no coincidence that science fiction and cyberpunk as a whole entered the collective cultural consciousness around the same time; there was a fear that Japan could be the next major economic power. “Out came films set in societies bustling with Asian imagery, equating Asianness with a fallen and terrible future,” Chloe Gong says.

Instead of being viewed as underdeveloped or backwards, Asia “[is] now associated with advancement and hyper-productivity,” and thus “Asian” becomes a synonym for “a culture that is cold, impersonal and machine-­like, an authoritarian culture lacking emotional connection to the rest of the world.” 

Furthermore, techno-orientalism also “[stokes] fears of a potential future where these machine-like Asian corporations are in power; thus justifying their dominance in world affairs by painting themselves as the better alternative to this imagined future.”

For example, in CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, the majority of the plot focuses on “the ineffective dismantling of a Japanese corporation that functions as a shadow organization.” The game “[allows] you to be a rebel and to dismantle the corporation under specific terms and conditions, while trying to balance the idea of ‘Cool Japan’ simultaneously.” 

All the while, the Arasaka Corporation (the primary villain of the game) is seemingly a “‘modern’ reimagining of the Japanese zaibatsu [large, family-owned Japanese industrial and financial businesses]” while the corporation’s CEO “is a stand-in for the ultra-nationalist Japanese soldier turned savvy businessman.”

In conclusion, the cyberpunk genre, from its very beginning, has been deeply connected to the cultural landscape of Japan. Japanese aesthetics are fundamentally intertwined with the genre, just as modern Japan has become synonymous with the technological advancements of the future. 

However, similarly, baked into the fundamentals of the genre is the xenophobic concept of techno-orientalism. In cyberpunk, more often than not, Asia becomes just as other and exotic as in other forms of orientalism.