Japanese influences and themes in Cyberpunk

There was a post taken down because it “wasn’t cyberpunk” about a Japanese company buying US Steel. The reason this post makes sense in a Cyberpunk context is directly tied to events in Japan during the mid to late 80’s and how those events (basically a giant financial bubble) lead to a massive negative reaction toward anything Japanese, and a lot of fear surrounding the purchase of multiple american businesses and a lot of american real estate by the Japanese (this ended when the bubble burst and their wealth, which was something akin to the UAE princes, came down to more normal levels) along with a fear of Japan’s seeming technical dominance.

Cyberpunk emerged in this era, and a lot of Cyberpunk literature riffs on this fear of Japan eventually owning everything. In much of Cyberpunk, Japanese hardware is the most desirable and powerful. Arasaka is one example of this, a massive faceless corporation with the added menace of being “other” in an area that directed a lot of xenophobia and financial and technological anxiety toward Japan.

If you weren’t alive during that era and grew up in the late 90s or 00s, it makes a lot of sense to be confused by all this, but during that era the cultural influence between the two countries was largely unidirectional, flowing from the US into Japan. There was no Pokemon. Talk of sushi was met with cries of “ew raw fish? gross!” If someone even knew what Anime was, they probably had the impression that it was just weird sex cartoons from “Asia” unless they were one of the 2-3 teenage or 20something boys/men who were importing it (or fan dubbing it a lot of times) at the local high school or college.

On top of this, Japan went through this massive financial bubble, while America was undergoing the last burning blast of cold war super patriotism. Scandals like Iran-Contra happened, and revelations from that really revealed how deeply the military industrial complex and government were interconnected, and how corrupt the government was. People were already afraid every day due to the neverending threat of nuclear war, where the common knowledge was “you can literally be obliterated any time of the day or night by the crazy commie Russians and we won’t even have a full 30 minutes warning.” Even children were told this. Wall Street was deep in its love affair with Cocaine. People actually thought big hair and neon was cool. Things were unhinged.

While there are novels with Cyberpunk themes and ideas before the 80s, in my opinion the genre was really defined by the Sprawl trilogy. Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. You can see Gibson extrapolating in these books a world where Japan isn’t just ascendant, it’s dominant. A superpower in a world where the United States is a hollow shell of it’s former grandiosity, still powerful, but the way an ex boxer in their late 50s is still likely to knock you out in one punch, but probably couldn’t go more than a round without collapsing. You see these themes explored in the explosion of Cyberpunk books that are published from 1984 on. Japan dominant becomes one of the genre tropes.

So a story about a major US company, one of the biggest ever with a storied history as an American titan, being bought out by a Japanese company is exactly in line with the themes and ideas in Cyberpunk as a genre, and plays out in real life one of the sort of irrational, sort of accurate fears that helped midwife the genre. While Japanese people and companies did buy a ton of American real estate in the mid to late 80s, the bubble that was driving their wealth burst shortly after that, and by the mid 90s they had largely sold all of those assets or lost them during the contraction of the Japanese economy.

Post war Japan is a pretty amazing country and has been a steadfast ally to the United States, but that relationship went sour for a while during the late 80s (to be fair, most of the planet did for various reasons). Since that brief era, the cultures of both countries have grown closer, and we can all see the true appreciation that many Americans have of Japanese culture and people (an appreciation that often goes both ways). I don’t think anyone is trying to say anything bad about Japan by pointing this purchase out, just calling back to the era that birthed a genre of fiction we all love, and events that heavily influenced it.

I found a pretty decent bit of reading about this era here if you’re interested and want something more coherent than my old guy rambling:

[https://allegrojapan.com/blogs/ayakas-tokyo-story/japan-in-the-1980s-seven-crazy-facts-about-the-bubble-period](https://allegrojapan.com/blogs/ayakas-tokyo-story/japan-in-the-1980s-seven-crazy-facts-about-the-bubble-period)

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