Why Does All Cyberpunk Themed Worlds Have Big Japanese Influence?

[molten]

I'm not talking about just this game alone. I'm talking about the whole genre of cyberpunk.

Like in Blade Runner for example.

They all have the same concept of "Japanese Being the Dominant Culture Over American Culture".

Japanese signs, corporations etc. are everywhere.

Why is that?

[セーラーマーズ]

引用自 CaoLex：

Not as much "missile" weapons as reactive weapons, that can delivery relatively heavy payload very fast.
Missiles itself will be less effective when there is railgans with high rate of fire and sometimes even lasers that can easily intercept them.

Also, Cyberpunk 2077 have smart guns in which every bullet behave as a small smart missile.

Oh. no no, missile weapons as in projectile weapons of any kind.

[Still]

引用自 R3m0ved：

引用自 tanjo：

The cyberpunk genre was partly established by Blade Runner in 1982 and Neuromancer in 1984. Both of which used Japan / Tokyo for inspiration when building their worlds. And then I think Neal Stephenson wrote a book about cyberpunk samurais and it was all over. Snow Crash? Haven't read it yet but I should soon!

Blade Runner book is from 1968 actually

Ridley Scott used Japanese Ads and a single japanese district where Howie Lee manufacture Replicant's eyes, that's about it for japanese influence in Blade Runner
Los Angeles city design was nowhere near Tokyo back in 1982, no buildings have japanese architecture, it's pure SF artist creation

Remember the Taffey Lewis bar scene where Deckard calls Rachel, the dancer chase scene, Leon, absolute no Japanese influence

The ads have been logically added cause Japan represented high tech (still as of today) know-how

Good response. In do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, there's more of an industrial scifi vibe. Not much Japanese stuff going on. I've actually read this book but didn't include it because it didn't seem influenced by asian culture to me.

I believe in the introduction in my copy of Neuromancer, they discuss this exact issue and mention that Tokyo during that time was def seen as technologically advanced and the whole atmosphere of that city was very similar to the setting in the book. It's been years since I've read it. This thread is inspiring me to get back into some Cyberpunk though.

Blade Runner and Neuromancer were the main two works of cyberpunk that established it in the western world as a genre and both had elements of Japenese culture. Giant billboards with videos of asian women, flying cars that behave like city traffic, rogue AI's, the Matrix, computer hackers / net runners who were basically poor drug addicts.. are things that came from or were largely popularized by Neuromancer or Blade Runner that we still see in the genre today. Neuromancer is about a rogue AI and hackers log into a virtual cyberspace called "The Matrix" to steal from coprorations. The plot of the game System Shock is influenced by Neuromancer. The term "flatlining" comes from Neuromancer too, which we hear a lot in Cyberpunk 2077. Neuromancer is great book, especially for computer nerds. Blade Runner helped established scifi noir with industrialized busy cities and homeless people where giant corporations run things and you have poverty mixed with super advanced technology.

Here's an article that talks about this stuff a bit more: https://steelseries.com/blog/who-created-cyberpunk-sci-fi-224

Looking through the plot of Neuromancer on WIkipedia just now, and it's reminding me of the cyber ninja bodyguards. So yeah, blame Neuromancer. But there are tons of other works out there that did this too, like Akira. I mean that one motorcyle and V's jacket in Cyberpunk 2077 are straight out of Akira.

[Sardu]

引用自 tanjo：

The cyberpunk genre was partly established by Blade Runner in 1982 and Neuromancer in 1984. Both of which used Japan / Tokyo for inspiration when building their worlds. And then I think Neal Stephenson wrote a book about cyberpunk samurais and it was all over. Snow Crash? Haven't read it yet but I should soon!

Snow Crash is an excellent read; you should definitely check it out!

When it first came out, a sociology course I was taking in college at the time threw out the originally intended syllabus and we spent the remainder of the semester studying and discussing concepts in that book exclusively. Good times.

[Atomsk]

The founders of the genre are all Japanese, Akira and Ghost in the Shell

[Umakurokoto]

引用自 Atomsk：

The founders of the genre are all Japanese, Akira and Ghost in the Shell :apex_pathfinder:

Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Vernor Vinge...

[pale_horse]

引用自 Atomsk：

The founders of the genre are all Japanese, Akira and Ghost in the Shell :apex_pathfinder:

The genre pre-dates those things by decades.

[Maine Man]

Because Japan aesthetic is cool

[pale_horse]

引用自 Hex：

引用自 pale_horse：

The genre pre-dates those things by decades.

No it doesn't. The book Blade Runner was inspired by has nothing to do with Cyberpunk. The genre didn't exist before Blade Runner and the Sprawl Trilogy by Gibson. Yes, Anime of the late 80s and 90s copied the style and ideas, but so did literally everything else. Shadowrun is literally Neuromancer with Elves, and that was written in 84. Hardly "decades"

This is wrong, and has been posted about at length several times.

For some reason people keep yelling "but Blade Runner!".

"Cyberpunk" is not about rainy cities and neon. It is a narrow-minded fiction (of the fiction) that that is what it is.

The themes of "cyberpunk" formed in the 60s and coalesced in the 70s. (Some people point to earlier works as well, but thats more complicated.) The exploration of tech, drugs and what those mean for "humanness", as well as the anti-utopianism of what became "cyberpunk" were kicked off by many people before the "Japanification" sub-genre.

For that matter the term "cyberpunk" predates Gibsons books .. so do the math on that one.

Moorcock (most people only know him as "the Elric guy" despite him being prolific) and Ballard laid the groundwork for what became "cyberpunk". :

The origins of cyberpunk are rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where New Worlds, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, began inviting and encouraging stories that examined new writing styles, techniques, and archetypes. Reacting to conventional storytelling, New Wave authors attempted to present a world where society coped with a constant upheaval of new technology and culture, generally with dystopian outcomes. ...

... Ballard attacked the idea that stories should follow the "archetypes" popular since the time of Ancient Greece, and the assumption that these would somehow be the same ones that would call to modern readers, as Joseph Campbell argued in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Instead, Ballard wanted to write a new myth for the modern reader, a style with "more psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the sombre half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics."

This had a profound influence on a new generation of writers, some of whom would come to call their movement "cyberpunk". ...

We dont even have to get too "literate" to figure this out. Judge Dredd was from the 70s. Akira didnt show up until the 80s.

Ellison won a Hugo for "I have No Mouth and I Must Scream" in the 60s.

The idea of "cyberspace" was clearly laid out in Vinges "True Names" even though he didnt use the word. (This predates Neuromancer.)

The "Japanese Cyberpunk" everyone fixates on kicked off in the 80s:

The Japanese cyberpunk subgenre began in 1982 with the debut of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga series Akira, with its 1988 anime film adaptation, which Otomo directed, later popularizing the subgenre. Akira inspired a wave of Japanese cyberpunk works, including manga and anime series such as Ghost in the Shell, Battle Angel Alita, Cowboy Bebop, and Serial Experiments Lain.

Gibson himself doesnt claim to have "invented" the ideas because hes honest:

Samuel R. Delany’s 1968 novel Nova is also considered one of the major forerunners of the cyberpunk movement. It prefigures, for instance, cyberpunk's staple trope of human interfacing with computers via implants. Writer William Gibson claimed to be greatly influenced by Delany, and his novel Neuromancer includes allusions to Nova.

[pale_horse]

While Im thinking about it - another (interesting) stepping stone in how "the cyberpunk thing" became what it became was Mondo 2000:

https://anarchivism.org/w/Mondo_2000

Along with the print version of bOING bOING — with which Mondo 2000 shared several writers, including Mark Frauenfelder, Richard Kadrey, Gareth Branwyn, and Jon Lebkowsky — Mondo 2000 helped develop what was to become the cyberpunk subculture. Writers included William Gibson, Nan C. Druid (pseudonym for Maerian Morris), Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, and Robert Anton Wilson.

The famous/infamous "R U A Cyberpunk?" image is from that magazine:
https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/r.u.-a-cyberpunk.jpg

The first issue is archived (link at the above link) here: https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.01.1989

Real-life discussions of early cryogenics, light-sound devices for mood alteration, "new media" (before the internet was a real thing) etc...

[img] https://i.imgur.com/VUbCR92.jpg [/img]

Even references Vinge and Gibson in the same sentence lol.

[pale_horse]

引用自 Hex：

I did, but you are missing the point. Gibson was inspired by x, y and z, Anime was inspired by Gibson. Neuromancer brought all the different elements together, which then inspired other things.

Im not missing the point, but its funny you had my post deleted while quoting it.

引用自 Hex：

Everyone interested in the genre should read the Sprawl Trilogy cause that series started the genre.

This is wrong. As I showed.

[Still]

Yeah I think the point is that Gibson coalesced all the aspects into one complete work so he gets the most credit. But clearly there's a lot of different things going on. But, yeah, for my money, Gibson is the one. Without Gibson, there is no Cyberpunk 2077 and probably no Matrix trilogy either.

[Still]

And Ghost in the Shell was released in 1995. Akira in 1988. Blade Runner 1982 and Neuromancer 1984. I think the reason Neuromancer gets more credit than Blade Runner is that it just has more components of Cyberpunk. Bladerunner has punks and cyber, but not a virtual cyberspace or ninjas. Bladerunner is great though. It's a little cliche at this point but that movie is basically a masterpiece. Speaking of movies, I've never seen Ghost in the Shell and this thread has me just about to rent it. I've seen Akira--it was basically life changing at 11 years old or so when I somehow got ahold of it--either renting it or seeing it on TV can't remember. I think it might have been playing on HBO or Cinemax or something sometime late at night or some other channel I had no business watching.

[BOT Cecil]

引用自 Hex：

引用自 Sly Alchemist：

Because Japan aesthetic is cool

Everyone interested in the genre should read the Sprawl Trilogy cause that series started the genre. To give you an idea, the currency used in that is called "Nu-yen"

And while there also read Virtual Light by Gibson. Fun fact: the currency used in that book is euro-dollars :)

[セーラーマーズ]

引用自 tanjo：

I've never seen Ghost in the Shell and this thread has me just about to rent it.

Don't forget to check out the comic too. It presents a lot more ideas, kinda funny but pervy lol

[セーラーマーズ]

引用自 Hex：

引用自 セーラーマーズ：

Don't forget to check out the comic too. It presents a lot more ideas, kinda funny but pervy lol

There's also Alita, Bubblegum Crisis and Ergo Proxy, just to name a few. Anime and Manga authors really ran with the Cyberpunk genre in the 90s and early 00s.

And Armitage III, yup. The Japanese style of cyberpunk has been a good influence on the genre.