News Cyberpunk 2077 resurrects 1980's "Japan Panic"

[Nightrider]

As with every form of media from the 1980s’ (and any form of media from the past, really), the genre is unfortunately colored by many of the anxieties that existed at the time, one of the most prominent being “Japan Panic” and Techno-Orientalism.

David Morely and Kevin Robins coined “Japan Panic” in their book Spaces of Identity. It was a fear that the Japanese economy would overtake the West through their electronics and automotive industries. To an extent, this came true. Profits for companies like GM, Ford, and Chrysler fell. Meanwhile, Nissan, Honda, and Toyota became prominent car brands in the US.

This led to a large public outcry towards foreign-made products. It also led to a spike in xenophobia against primarily the Japanese and Japanese diaspora. Worse yet, there wasn’t a clear distinction between Japanese and other East Asian ethnicities at the time. As a result, much of the racial hostilities were also aimed at Chinese and Korean-Americans as well. These racial tensions would eventually culminate in the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American who was mistaken as Japanese and killed by two former Chrysler autoworkers. (They would receive no jail time.)

Japanophobia was not new (See: World War II). But this resurgence of fear towards the Japanese would make its way into many pieces of popular media during the 80s’. Some examples were tame, such as in Back to the Future II where future-Marty works for an angry Japanese boss. Others such as Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, focused on Japanese “Zaibatsu” companies as power-hungry threats to US economic dominance. And in an effort to combat these imagined threats, many pieces of media — from movies and television, to literature and video games — took to portraying Japanese people as an “other” that needed to be fought against.

Japanophobia in Cyberpunk

This Japanophobia is also present in cyberpunk. It’s why so many seminal pieces of cyberpunk almost always feature monopolistic Japanese conglomerates. It's also why Japanese culture is shown as prevalent to an absurd degree. Places like Los Angeles serve as perfect settings. Such cities are regarded as a melting pot of cultures. Additionally, such settings mix in the American anxiety of living in a future where English may be a second language. It’s the reason why, rather than making accurate representations of Japanese culture (be it food or music), most studios default to using a pastiche of Orientalist designs that blend Japanese, Chinese, and other East Asian cultures together. At best, this results in a focus on the more “popular” forms of Japanese culture like Geisha, Noh, and Anime. At worst, you get cultural appropriation, stories that are weirdly fixated on “honor”, and just blatant racist caricature.

Western cyberpunk’s obsession with heavy-handed cultural iconography becomes even more apparent when you compare it to its Japanese counterpart. Japanese cyberpunk, in contrast, is able to cover topics such as the increasing influence of the military, income inequality and poverty, and government corruption, all without the fetishizing of foreign cultures. This could be explained simply by the fact that there are few — if any — prominent non-Japanese characters in Japanese cyberpunk media. Nevertheless, it proves that a piece of media can still be considered “Cyberpunk” without having a foreign, antagonistic “other.”

Inspiration is one thing. It's understandable that a studio would prefer to keep to the rules of a game's source material and genre. But that's where things go wrong. By trying to “stay true to the source material”, Cyberpunk 2077 ends up inheriting many of its problematic elements as well. Because to Western studios like CD Projekt Red, the aesthetic — including its racial caricatures and xenophobic settings — is not just a racist relic from the 1980s; it is Cyberpunk.

How Cyberpunk 2077 Resurrects the 1980s' "Japan Panic" - Unseen Japan

Why is Cyberpunk 2077 so over-the-top in its portrayal of Japanese culture? A look at the historical roots of the genre's techno-Orientalism.

unseenjapan.com