No it doesn’t. Chinese and other immigrant communities from East Asia have been been a vibrant part of Californian culture for nearly 200 years. Scaring white people with images of predominantly Asian backdrops and Asian corporate and technological superiority is pretty racist, and those tropes deserve careful inspection. They weren’t Ok in the 80s, the only way it was a different time was anyone who might have called them on it didn’t have a platform to do so. It is definitely worth noting about Blade Runner, which was made and set in LA, which was incredibly diverse when the film was made. (Edit to spell it out clearly: Chinese and Japanese culture are only alien to Los Angeleans who are racist, and that’s been true for a very long time.)
Chinese immigrants literally built the railroad that brought the white people who started complaining about all the immigrants.
I don’t think cyberpunk leaning on “the future is Asian” is about the gadgets, though. It’s about the existential fear that white people have of some culture other than America becoming dominant in the soft power sense. I think that’s why giant kanji in neon advertisements said “dystopian” to white Americans in 1982.
I’ll add that I do think that the physical landscape of Blade Runner and other cyberpunk back in the 80s was also a stand in for fears of Asian corporations becoming predominant, a bit more than popular culture taking over. But now anime, manga, and J-and-K-pop are actually wildly popular among millennials and Gen-Zers (though Gen X had a not too small contingent of anime fans, and in fact probably started a lot of the fan-run conventions across the country, that’s a least true locally). So it’s the popular culture that is actually getting a fair amount of attention rather than Asian businesses of other kinds… Of course, part of what drove that is probably all the cyberpunk films of the 80s that had some racist, dystopian overtones… But who excels at dystopian fiction? Japan, that’s who!
It wasn’t just imagery. The semiconductor industry went from US dominated to (at their peak in 1985) Japan producing just under 50% of the worlds supply (that kind of shift is happening again with Taiwan at the lead). And that’s one of several industries (video games, CDs, and laptop computers certainly also qualify) where Japanese companies introduced ground-breaking new technology. Asia DID have the best tech. I think it’s natural that any futurists at the time would embrace their reality and use that to project forward.
Deckard didn’t encounter Asian people when he was meeting with high-powered tech moguls like Mr. Tyrell. He encountered Asian people when he was searching the city’s gritty working-class underbelly trying to track down a bunch of criminals.
Lately, looking at the discussion around the “Cyberpunk” game, I’ve come to the conclusion that when we talk about the “cyberpunk genre” we’re actually talking about several different things (e.g. movies vs. literature) that developed in parallel, often with little-to-no cross pollination, that were subsequently lumped together. Gibson, for example, hadn’t ever seen “Blade Runner” when writing his novels, and although he specifically saw contemporary Tokyo as part of his “unevenly distributed future,” and set parts of his stories there, that’s different from the apparently pan-Asianness that superficially sits on top of Blade Runner (and subsequent cinematic imitators). Other cyberpunk authors didn’t use Asia as a setting (or a trapping).
There’s probably also an argument to be made for a separate development of “Japanese cyberpunk” manga/anime - specifically things like “Akira” - that was influenced by Blade Runner (and then, at some point, Western literary cyberpunk) and then came back to influence US game culture (tabletop and computer) and then, much later, eventually to influence US movie designs as well (starting, I think, with “The Matrix”).
Yeah, I think that’s a big part of the origin of the movie/tv aesthetic, what I was referencing with the idea that the future was “occupied” by Asian-ness, something imposed upon it, rather than a reflection of the future culture of the US. (It strikes me that these movies require this weird idea of “the future” as a thing unto itself, separate from simply depicting the culture and lives of people who live some decades from now.)
Firefly, I recollect, was trying to do something different - they had this notion that China, just by dint of its population numbers, had a global cultural impact which carried over into space, with the characters using Chinese words, design elements, etc. But that just made things incredibly weird when there were no Asian actors on screen, the references were limited (and limited to China), and with “space culture” otherwise just resembling 19th century European colonialism…
Meanwhile what happens when Asians import westerners in as a main character is way more interesting:
That’s just it though - predominantly white cast movies are the ones that get to flop and their failure is attributed to the flaws of that particular movie. Nobody goes “well I guess white actors just don’t sell.” Only the failure of minority cast movies are attributed to the ethnicity of the cast.
Same way if Wonderwoman had flopped the conclusion would have been that people don’t like female superhero movies, but when Green Lantern flopped, the conclusion was that people don’t like mediocre movies.
Deckard didn’t encounter Asian people when he was meeting with high-powered tech moguls like Mr. Tyrell.
The only tech mogul in the whole movie was Tyrell. But Deckard also met 2 of the Nexus 6 designers, one of which was Asian. Everyone else in the movie were replicants, police, or “little people”.
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