A bleak vision of a possible future, members of a lawless subculture struggling against oppression — the oppressor, a computer-driven authoritarian government, all set in a futuristic landscape…these are broadly the ingredients of cyberpunk.
The subgenre began developing in the mid-1960s-1970s in comics such as 2000 AD in the UK, and in the US in works like the novels and short stories of writers such as Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, JG Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, and Roger Zelazny, which explored the impact of drug culture, the sexual revolution, and a rapidly expanding technological market in a provocative and daring manner. Although the works of these authors are foundational to the culture of cyberpunk, it wasn’t until the 1980s that it became what audiences recognise it as today.
If I were tasked with picking two pieces of cyberpunk media which influenced the genre globally, they would be Blade Runner (1982) (Ridley Scott’s very loose adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick) and William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) which have helped to define the genre aesthetically and thematically more than anything else. Each would accurately predict the rise of globalisation, and Neuromancer, astonishingly, even predicted the rise of home computers, virtual reality, and forum culture/early social media with frightening accuracy. Both Blade Runner and Neuromancer combine futuristic settings either set in or inspired by the industrial mega-cities of Japan or Hong Kong with the tenets of film noir and detective fiction. Both focus on brooding loners as protagonists scarred physically and mentally in societies controlled by corporate elites, or as Lawrence Person (editor of Nova Express) put it:
Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, a ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.
Rick Deckard and Henry Dorsett Case, the antiheroes of Blade Runner and Neuromancer, encapsulate this idea perfectly, as both characters are either scarred physically (Case’s nervous system is destroyed to a point where he can’t access cyberspace as a punishment) or psychologically (Deckard is traumatised by his job as a Blade Runner, an assassin who hunts down synthetic humans [replicants] for the police).
So how did the genre establish itself in Japan? To understand this, it’s essential to look at what Japanese sci-fi was like pre-cyberpunk. Japanese sci-fi in the ’60s-’70s, as in the West, was largely optimistic, apart from a few examples of darker work such as the original Godzilla (1954) by Ishiro Honda, a parable for Japan coming to terms with the horrific devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Looking at sci-fi manga and anime from the 1950s-1970s, for the most part you will find the same pattern. Series such as Tezuka’s Astro Boy, Perman, Speed Racer, Tetsujin 28 go, Captain Harlock, and Cobra are all examples of what I would call utopian adventure science fiction to some extent. There were influential series such as Leji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam 0079, which were darker and more pessimistic than their predecessors, but the norm for Japanese science fiction was more optimistic. Characters like Ultraman and Kamen Rider always used their powers to defeat the monsters threatening Earth, and the Godzilla franchise went from being a sombre cautionary tale to being bright, colourful, and cartoonish extravaganzas of dudes in rubber suits punching each other (which I have no problem with whatsoever).
To become philosophical for a second, however, change is just as much of a fact to filmmaking as it is to life. In the 1980s, a bold new group of experimental indie filmmakers would emerge in Japan and irrevocably change Japanese science fiction. Gakuryu Ishii, Shinya Tsukamoto, Shigeru Izumiya, and Shozin Fuki were a group of young independent filmmakers who were largely influenced by the Japanese punk movement and wider counterculture. Gakuryu Ishii had made waves in Japan’s underground scene through his first two movies Panic High School (a Japanese Over the Edge) and Crazy Thunder Road (a movie made for his graduation project that impressed Toei Studios and gained distribution), a kaleidoscopic action movie focusing on biker gang culture. Both of these projects carved out Ishii’s reputation as an avant-garde punk director.
It wasn’t until Ishii’s third movie, 1982’s Burst City, where what audiences would come to know as Japanese cyberpunk would be formed. Even over 40 years later, Burst City hits the audience like a speed bag. A punk rock musical featuring tracks by the likes of The Roosters and The Stalin, the plot focuses on an oppressed underclass trying to stop a nuclear power plant being opened in their neighbourhood against their will, culminating in a gigantic battle sequence between the punks, bikers, and power plant builders taking on the police, yakuza, and the businessman who wants to build the power plant in the first place.
Taking its stylistic cues from David Lynch’s debut Eraserhead (1977) and George Miller’s Mad Max series (1979-1985), Burst City is a jarring and fragmented narrative underpinned by an irreverent tone and sensibility expressed through minimal dialogue. Ishii’s directing style incorporates extensive use of close-ups, time-lapse photography, and dynamic cuts, which gives the movie a palpable sense of urgency. To a generation raised on Godzilla and Ultraman ,watching something as daring and fatalistic as Burst City must have been alluring and incomprehensible at the same time. Science fiction in Japan was never going to be the same again.
Whilst Burst City launched the nascent Japanese cyberpunk movement cinematically, Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga Akira would debut in Young Magazine in 1982, just a few months after Burst City was released into cinemas. Otomo was a highly regarded mangaka before Akira, due to his manga Domo (1980-81), but it would be his magnum opus Akira that would both form a foundational component of Japanese cyberpunk and make him a household name internationally. Akira is a stark, brutal post-apocalyptic tale set in a rebuilt version of Tokyo named Neo-Tokyo. The narrative centres on a biker gang led by the charismatic Shotaro Kaneda, a group of militant revolutionaries, a trio of psychic children experimented on by the government, and a military leader named Colonel Shikishima all trying to stop Kaneda’s childhood friend, tragic megalomaniac Tetsuo Shima, from using his psychic abilities to destroy Neo-Tokyo and awaken Akira, the mysterious last child of the government’s ESP experimentation programme.
Otomo, being of the Baby Boomer generation, was raised on a steady diet of the aspirational Japanese science fiction of the 1950s-’60s, especially Tetsujin 28-go, with Kaneda, Tetsuo, and Colonel Shikashima all being named in homage to it by Otomo. But make no mistake, Akira was an incendiary work which took science fiction by storm, first through manga and then through the 1988 film adaptation directed by Otomo himself. Akira’s countercultural tone, introspective look at Japan’s post-World War II identity, body horror, and cynicism/disgust towards the establishment struck a chord with audiences.
If Burst City had laid the groundwork, then the success of Akira took cyberpunk into overdrive, with a new spate of cyberpunk anime/manga (e.g., Ghost in the Shell, Armitage III, Bubblegum Crisis, and Battle Angel Alita) and movies such as Death Powder, Tetsuo the Iron Man (the title being taken from the Akira character Tetsuo), and 964 Pinocchio all taking their stylistic cues from Otomo in their presentation of body horror and the rat race of urban Japan. Narratively, however, you can see the influence of Ishii due to their fragmented approach to storytelling with music and surreal, nightmarish imagery taking precedence over complex dialogue-heavy storytelling.
Despite cyberpunk awakening a latent cynicism in audiences, Japan of the 1980s was one of the most stable and prosperous countries in the world economically. Thanks to a booming housing market, pioneering consumer technologies, and a national bank that would give out loans to whomever asked, the country was in a perpetual cycle of economic success. Then the early ’90s happened, when the bubble burst and Japan went into a recession from which, according to people far more knowledgeable on economics than I am, the country has never recovered.
Circling back to the topic at hand, this collapse impacted cyberpunk in Japan as the discontent brought about by the recession formed a new, less contrasting societal backdrop for cyberpunk narratives to take place in, and the antipathy that the characters in Burst City, Akira, and Tetuso the Iron Man felt towards the establishment had now come full circle into reality. Anime such as Serial Experiments Lain would explore the growing influence of the internet and expanded communications upon society, Ghost in the Shell examined what it truly meant to be human, and a further wave of cyberpunk cinema and anime such as Electric Dragon 80,000 Volts (also directed by Gakuryu Ishii), Meatball Machine, Paprika, Texhnolyze ,and Tokyo Gore Police catered to the generation left behind by the economic bubble’s collapse.
My subjective barometer for gauging a piece of art or an artistic movement’s impact is if the stylistic trappings or intent from that specific piece of art or movement can still be seen today, and with Japanese cyberpunk that is definitively the case. The regard which Ishii’s and Tsukamoto’s work is held in, coupled with the success of Akira and Ghost in the Shell in the West, have inspired numerous filmmakers, musicians, and game designers in both the Eastern and Western spheres. These range from Hideo Kojima (creator of Metal Gear Solid); the Wachowski sisters (the creators of The Matrix franchise); Christopher Nolan; the video game series Deus Ex; musicians such as Daft Punk, Kanye West, and Lupe Fiasco; and the TV show Stranger Things all the way to the works of Quentin Tarantino.The fingerprints of Japanese cyberpunk can be found on some of the most influential media of the last 30 years. If that doesn’t show how influential an artistic movement it was and continues to be, I really don’t know what else would.
As society has become more fractured and technologised, cyberpunk has become the dominant mode of science fiction globally, superseding its influences listed in the introduction. Although cyberpunk is now a global artistic movement, it would not be where it is now without the works of Ishii, Otomo, Tsukamoto, and the other pioneers of Japanese cyberpunk that struck out on their own path.
