Abstract
This paper attempts to meditate upon the transpacific imagination of cyberpunk by reconstructing its literary and cultural heritage. Since the publication of William Gibson’s multiple award winning first novel, Neuromancer (1984), the concept of cyberpunk has been globally popularized and disseminated not only in the field of literature but also in culture. However, we should not forget that cyberpunk is derived not only from the cutting edge of technology but also from “Lo Tek” sensibility cultivated in the Gibsonian picturesque ruins or dark cities such as a major extraterritorial zone in Hong Kong “Kowloon Walled City” nicknamed as “a den of iniquity”, “The Casba of the East”, and “a hotbed of crime”, which was destroyed in 1993, but whose images captured by Ryuji Miyamoto inspired Gibson to come up with the spectacle of the destroyed San Francisco Bay Bridge to be stormed by ex-hippies and former homeless. From this perspective, this chapter focuses on the works ranging from Katsuhiro Otomo’s directed anime Akira (1988), Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1998)) in the 1990s through Project Itoh’s post-cyberpunk masterpiece Genocidal Organ (2007).
Highlights
The ongoing project of the Tokyo Olympic Games 2020 cannot help but remind me not of the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964 I attended as an elementary school kid, and of Otomo Katsuhiro’s six volume cyberpunk manga Akira (Otomo 1982–1993) and its anime version, Akira (Otomo 1988), the 2019 setting of which had already supposed that the post-apocalyptic megalopolis Neo Tokyo would host the Tokyo Olympic in 2020
The Kowloon Walled City vanished from the earth in 1993
Kowloon’s Gate still keeps haunting our mind, we are still likely to envision a number of ghosts and monsters very active in the imaginary City. It is the ghost of the very city that has long obsessed us, for cyberpunk has persistently questioned the boundaries between the organic and the mechanic, the living and the dead, civilization and junkyard
Summary
The ongoing project of the Tokyo Olympic Games 2020 cannot help but remind me not of the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964 I attended as an elementary school kid, and of Otomo Katsuhiro’s six volume cyberpunk manga Akira (Otomo 1982–1993) and its anime version, Akira (Otomo 1988), the 2019 setting of which had already supposed that the post-apocalyptic megalopolis Neo Tokyo would host the Tokyo Olympic in 2020. I was to discover later that the Institute for Nature Study had always already been more cultural than natural, in the way its “educational garden” reproduced plant communities from earlier days and in the way it used to be an explosives warehouse back in Meiji Period (1868–1911) and a center closely related with Unit 731, a Japanese military unit notorious for testing on humans and animals illegally and developing new biological weapons during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) of World War II, which cannot help but recall the way the human experimentations resulted in post-apocalypse in Akira This is the reason why Shirokane tunnel constructed right under the expressway, splitting the formerly beautiful botanical garden, is rumored to have been haunted by a number of ghosts of the victims of. Itoh’s post-cyberpunk masterpiece, Genocidal Organ (Murase 2017; Project Itoh 2012)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
