Imagine: you live in a wealthy country that can economically rival the United States. There are a lot of opportunities for work and entrepreneurship, you have a lot of money, your country produces things that no one else can, they're of high quality and have an extremely competitive price, so competitive, in fact, that they can expand all over the world.
That was Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. The economic miracle that threatened to take over the world. And that simultaneously inspired people in the Western countries — and frightened them. The impact of Japanese pop culture was huge; anime was exported to other countries, books on how Japanese companies did business were filling the shelves, and Japanese traditions of general life, education, and entertainment were seeping into other countries that wanted to repeat the Japanese economic boom.
Japanese businesses were rich enough to buy American companies for the branding or the land, and rich enough to open their own subsidiaries in the United States that were producing higher quality products than the local ones at a lower price.
Authors are feeble, finicky creatures, who react quite strongly to changes in the world around them. And some of them, living in the West, were afraid of Japan winning over everyone else. This frustration, this fear is what created the genre of cyberpunk.
Streets glistening in neon, huge family-owned mega-corporations that seem to control everything, not just a piece of the market, but the country itself and its people through the technology that everyone became so dependent on — this is the future that the prominent Western authors feared. This phenomenon is called "Japan Panic."
There is a huge difference in how Japan itself viewed the genre. It was also developing there at the same time. Japanese people were the first ones to experience the rapid invasion of technology, its assault on consumer habits. The cyberpunk that has been conjured in Japan was also rooted in fear, but not of the dominance of one culture over the other: it feared mainly the loss of humanity and the smearing borders between humans and machines alongside the industrial disasters.
Funnily, the Western obsession with Japan and its portrayal in cyberpunk helped Japan find out its current identity in the 1980s, in the middle of the "Bubble Economy" — the most financially prolific time in Japan.
But its roots are sitting deeply in the underground punk music scene of the 1970s that rose to the surface with the release of indie films Panic High School and Crazy Thunder Road, which were picked up by major studios and went mainstream.
The focus on government corruption and uselessness, rebellion, misuse of technology, and its rapid development channeled through the rebellious youth is what shaped the cyberpunk genre in Japan. And the release of Akira, of course, helped solidify this image.
Despite the futuristic outlook, the society depicted in the manga shared a lot of problems of the one people actually lived in, just portrayed them in a bit more grotesque way with a layer of over-reliance on technology on top of it.
The manga series Akira was released in 1982, and anime followed in 1988; the great economic bubble burst in 1992, and after that Japanese cyberpunk also adapted deeper ideas of hopelessness. This lead to one interesting feature: unlike Western cyberpunk, where the hero is usually an individual trying to fix the system from the outside, in Japanese cyberpunk the change usually comes from the inside.
Heroes of Japanese cyberpunk after the collapse of the economic system work in law enforcement, they are somehow tied to the government — like the famous Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, or the leading team in Bubblegum Crisis, or the whole crew in Psycho-pass as an example of one of the more recent works.
This is probably the result of dissatisfaction with the measures taken by the government as the bubble burst: the will to have someone inside who would be ready to repair whatever's faulty and take responsibility. This is also proved by the fact that the antagonists in these works are usually the government-controlled structures, too.
After all, the generation of people who were in their prime in the 90s is called "The Lost Generation" in Japan, those who, in comparison to the working class of the 60s-80s, didn't have any opportunities and didn't have much hope for the future.
The reliance on technology was rising, dragging with it themes of body horror and body modification; the inherently depressing upbringing of this generation forced the authors to raise more serious questions about the place of a human being in the world and what being human means.
So while Western cyberpunk was born out of fear of Japan, Japanese cyberpunk was born through an existential crisis and was later developed through the economic one, which brought with it severe dissatisfaction with the government. This inwardness and self-awareness is what makes Japanese cyberpunk different from the Western depictions of the genre.
It's based on a different type of fear.
Imagine: you live in a wealthy country that can economically rival the United States. There are a lot of opportunities for work and entrepreneurship, you have a lot of money, your country produces things that no one else can, they're of high quality and have an extremely competitive price, so competitive, in fact, that they can expand all over the world.
That was Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. The economic miracle that threatened to take over the world. And that simultaneously inspired people in the Western countries — and frightened them. The impact of Japanese pop culture was huge; anime was exported to other countries, books on how Japanese companies did business were filling the shelves, and Japanese traditions of general life, education, and entertainment were seeping into other countries that wanted to repeat the Japanese economic boom.
Japanese businesses were rich enough to buy American companies for the branding or the land, and rich enough to open their own subsidiaries in the United States that were producing higher quality products than the local ones at a lower price.
Authors are feeble, finicky creatures, who react quite strongly to changes in the world around them. And some of them, living in the West, were afraid of Japan winning over everyone else. This frustration, this fear is what created the genre of cyberpunk.
Streets glistening in neon, huge family-owned mega-corporations that seem to control everything, not just a piece of the market, but the country itself and its people through the technology that everyone became so dependent on — this is the future that the prominent Western authors feared. This phenomenon is called "Japan Panic."
There is a huge difference in how Japan itself viewed the genre. It was also developing there at the same time. Japanese people were the first ones to experience the rapid invasion of technology, its assault on consumer habits. The cyberpunk that has been conjured in Japan was also rooted in fear, but not of the dominance of one culture over the other: it feared mainly the loss of humanity and the smearing borders between humans and machines alongside the industrial disasters.
Funnily, the Western obsession with Japan and its portrayal in cyberpunk helped Japan find out its current identity in the 1980s, in the middle of the "Bubble Economy" — the most financially prolific time in Japan.
But its roots are sitting deeply in the underground punk music scene of the 1970s that rose to the surface with the release of indie films Panic High School and Crazy Thunder Road, which were picked up by major studios and went mainstream.
The focus on government corruption and uselessness, rebellion, misuse of technology, and its rapid development channeled through the rebellious youth is what shaped the cyberpunk genre in Japan. And the release of Akira, of course, helped solidify this image.
Despite the futuristic outlook, the society depicted in the manga shared a lot of problems of the one people actually lived in, just portrayed them in a bit more grotesque way with a layer of over-reliance on technology on top of it.
The manga series Akira was released in 1982, and anime followed in 1988; the great economic bubble burst in 1992, and after that Japanese cyberpunk also adapted deeper ideas of hopelessness. This lead to one interesting feature: unlike Western cyberpunk, where the hero is usually an individual trying to fix the system from the outside, in Japanese cyberpunk the change usually comes from the inside.
Heroes of Japanese cyberpunk after the collapse of the economic system work in law enforcement, they are somehow tied to the government — like the famous Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, or the leading team in Bubblegum Crisis, or the whole crew in Psycho-pass as an example of one of the more recent works.
This is probably the result of dissatisfaction with the measures taken by the government as the bubble burst: the will to have someone inside who would be ready to repair whatever's faulty and take responsibility. This is also proved by the fact that the antagonists in these works are usually the government-controlled structures, too.
After all, the generation of people who were in their prime in the 90s is called "The Lost Generation" in Japan, those who, in comparison to the working class of the 60s-80s, didn't have any opportunities and didn't have much hope for the future.
The reliance on technology was rising, dragging with it themes of body horror and body modification; the inherently depressing upbringing of this generation forced the authors to raise more serious questions about the place of a human being in the world and what being human means.
So while Western cyberpunk was born out of fear of Japan, Japanese cyberpunk was born through an existential crisis and was later developed through the economic one, which brought with it severe dissatisfaction with the government. This inwardness and self-awareness is what makes Japanese cyberpunk different from the Western depictions of the genre.
