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?

[Captain Crummy]

because the Japanese are a strongly homogeneous culture and society. Any history book will show you those cultures are the ones that last the longest.

[Bealla Donna]

Idk, maybe cause Japan and Asian culture in general is just cool as hell? Like most modern rich houses in Japan have a futuristic aesthetic, like even their toliets have all these buttons on em that do all kinds of things like hospital beds.

[Heu, Iterum Id Feci]

molten の投稿を引用：

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?

Probably because the founders of the Cyberpunk genre were a fan of japanese culture, and ninjas and katanas are cool. Also Japanese companies were pretty strong in that time period and it wasn't to much of a stretch seeing them rise in power internationally, while a lot of other companies seemed kinda stale at the time.
From there it manifested in the story itself. As Cyberpunk has been a rather small genre, a lot of those authors leaned on each others work, and more or less tried to use the same overarching lore, so it stayed more of a shared world than a diverse genre, while other more popular genres were to big, to realisticly have similar shared lore in the same amount.
At least that's my impression/interpretation of how it came to be. I'msure there are people who are more versed in Caberpunk lore than me. ;)

[talemore]

Robocop, I am Robot, the terminator.

I think OP is wrong and has prejudiced the theme of cyberpunk.

[Mori Dan]

Bealla Donna の投稿を引用：

Idk, maybe cause Japan and Asian culture in general is just cool as hell? Like most modern rich houses in Japan have a futuristic aesthetic, like even their toliets have all these buttons on em that do all kinds of things like hospital beds.

As a Japanese person myself, it ain't just the rich with the electric toilets. We got them in many modern homes and in pretty much every public toilet.

[Bahamut_A6M5]

Night City is in the West Coast, in the Pacific area. When the Great Collapse struck, US economy sunk deep bottom, leaving that economic area open for eastern expansion. Asian corporations, specially japanese one, took advantage of that and expanded unimpeded for a decade or so, "colonizing" the USA.

At the same time, the federal government was in dire need of money, so it welcomed any corporation, even foreign ones, into US soil. Add salt to injury with free competition and free market and you end with a japanese corporation as Arasaka pulling strings in Night City (Japantown, Kabuki, a place in the NC Corp board,...).

However, that japanese influence isn't as strong as OP suggest. Biotechnica, for example, is an italian corporation. Techtronica and SovOil are russian corporations. If you pay attention, Arasaka and Kang Tao are the eastern corporations with some punch among a lot of western corporations. Still, geographically speaking, Night City position in the Pacific makes it more "vulnerable" to eastern corporations settling there than western corporations.

[deadsponge]

i put it down to blade runner influence

[Northwold]

molten の投稿を引用：

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?

Because in the 80s and into the 90s Japan was THE world leader in tech products. It's still today the third largest economy in the world.

There's a joke in Back to the Future (part III i think) in which Doc Brown says something like "no wonder this doesn't work it says made in Japan" and Marty replies "Whaddya mean, Doc, all the best stuff is made in Japan." That's the context. It's funny because, at the time, it was blindingly obvious.

[GB17665]

many of the cyberpunk books were written in the 80s and during that time a lot of people thought japan would economically pass US, i don't know the answer i'm just spitballing

[Bealla Donna]

Mori Dan の投稿を引用：

Bealla Donna の投稿を引用：

Idk, maybe cause Japan and Asian culture in general is just cool as hell? Like most modern rich houses in Japan have a futuristic aesthetic, like even their toliets have all these buttons on em that do all kinds of things like hospital beds.

As a Japanese person myself, it ain't just the rich with the electric toilets. We got them in many modern homes and in pretty much every public toilet.

See, that is just *chefs kiss* beautiful.

[voidofopinion]

Its actually because America nuked Japan in WW2 which lead to the rebuilding of Japan and the cross pollination of cultures which peeked in the 80's. Bladerunner was released in 1982, Neuromancer would take a lot of its visual and world building cues from Bladerunner and Cyberpunk would take from both.

Hence... giant neon Kanji signs....

[charly4711]

Because when the cyberpunk genre had its defining moments, many people in Western countries were expecting/fearing Japanese megacorps would take over the world, soon. It's not only Cyberpunk, it was a rather pervasive idea at the time. Watch Rising Sun with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, for example. People considered learning Japanese a smart career choice, etc.
The same kind of people who today fear the Chinese influence, were concerned about the Japanese at the time, and it seemed not without reason. That prediction was obviously a little off.

[charly4711]

voidofopinion の投稿を引用：

Its actually because America nuked Japan in WW2 which lead to the rebuilding of Japan and the cross pollination of cultures which peeked in the 80's.....

And that, too *nodsnods*

[Rabidnid]

molten の投稿を引用：

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?

At the time these books were written the Japanese economy was absolutely dominant in the world. Japanese companies like Mitsubishi were spending the equivalent of the entire GDP of West Germany to buy a power station in northern Japan and people were needing to take out generation loans (that would be handed down to their children and grandchildren) to buy property in Tokyo because a ! bedroom flat was 7 million US.

A decade after this time this artificially inflated economy crashed and Japan became just like other strong economies.

[Alpha and Omega]

1. Japan was an up and coming economy that formed one of the main centres of technological innovation when Cyberpunk was in it's nascent years. So it seemed that Japan would play a big role in the culture of the future. In 1992 their economy crashed and in many ways never really recovered.

2. Multiculturalism was seen as the future (and it's now our present), and the presence of Japanese influences represents that.

3. The cyperpunk cityscapes are heavily inspired by the abstract cityscapes of German impressionism - and Japanese cityscapes of all real life locations most resemble those images.

4. As William Gibson (author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic) writing for TIME magazine put it in 2001:

"It was not that there was a cyberpunk move-ment in Japan or a native literature akin to cyberpunk, but that modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. And the Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns — all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information — said, "You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town." And it was. It so evidently was."

5. While Japan didn't invent cyberpunk, in the wake of Neuromancer and Bladerunner they took the ball and ran with it. Many of the early seminal works in cyperpunk were made in Japan: Akira, Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, Bubblegum Crisis... and that's just for starters.