Cyberpunk and Japanese Culture

William Gibson’s Burning Chrome and Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World have inspired me to further research cyberpunk and its influence from Japanese culture. In general, cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on the combination of “low life and high tech.” Low life is characterized as an outcast of society and high tech is the futuristic technological means to which rebellion is enabled. Cyberpunk writers tend to draw elements from detective fiction, especially the hardboiled detective fiction genre In the 1980s, cyberpunk was heavily inspired by Japanese economy and technological advancements, reflecting Western fears about Eastern imperialism. Even William Gibson himself stated that “modern Japan simply was cyberpunk.” This fear from the West was referred to as “techno-orientalism.”

During the 1980s, Japan was a global technological powerhouse. The cyberpunk genre that was developed had painted Tokyo with neon LED lights as a futuristic mystery. The sense of unease and doubts people had about rapid advancement of technology as weapons of mass destruction quickly provided a reasonable backdrop for cyberpunk. Most of the time, cities in the cyberpunk subgenre are also physically divided, with bridges built to support different infrastructural elevations but also social stratifications.

Additionally, cyberpunk writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy Rucker weren’t just inspired by the societal distrust of technology’s power but also by the frustrations experienced with the limitations of science fiction at the time. Gibson states, “mid-century mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism” (Somers). Cyberpunk offered the pushback against this traditional theme of science fiction which had assumed that Western military prowess were positive things of the future. Cyberpunk demonstrates a pushback against authorities in general through a dystopian backdrop. 

 

Yiqin 

Citations: 

https://www.grunge.com/355271/the-untold-truth-of-the-origins-of-cyberpunk/ 

https://www.neondystopia.com/what-is-cyberpunk/#:~:text=Cyberpunk%20is%20also%20a%20culture,fatale%2C%20a%20city%20at%20night.