Page 73 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

60 Nightmare Japan

Technology, East/West Border Crossing and Cyberpunk

Like many Western works of speculative fiction, Naked Blood engages
cultural trepidations surrounding rapid increases in technological
development. In its extensive depictions of computers, video equipment,
designer drugs, and virtual reality, Sato’s film borrows tropes from the
cyberpunk genre. As scholars like Joshua La Bare and Takayuki Tatsumi
have illustrated, Japanese science fiction and its Western counterparts
have existed in a strange state of symbiosis in which each tradition
borrows from the other, with various Orientalist and Occidentalist
consequences. The scope of this ideological cross-fertilisation is quite
extensive, however even a perfunctory survey of Western and Japanese
cyberpunk texts reveals the degree to which these traditions inform one
another. William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer (1984), and Ridley
Scott’s film, Blade Runner (1982), are merely two examples of well-
known Western cyberpunk texts that are particularly rich with Orientalist
imaginings of Japanese culture as simultaneously mysterious, seductive,
apocalyptic, and technophilic. When these motifs find their way into
contemporary Japanese science fiction, a recursive pattern of cultural
inflection occurs, in which Japanese works of speculative fiction
simultaneously perpetuate and condition operant tropologies. Certain
familiar motifs emerge, but they are frequently invested with cultural
codings that often confound Western viewers. Thus, while many Western
cyberpunk narratives tend to adopt a largely cautionary, if not outright
pessimistic view towards the conflation of the ‘human’ and the
‘technological’, the ‘extrapolative tendency’ in Japanese science fiction
‘seems more oriented towards enthusiasm for the benefits or potential
consequences [of technology] than for any social changes likely to be
caused by that technology’ (Hull and Siegel 1989: 262).
The cross-cultural transfusion of science fiction tropes extends
back at least to post-World War II Japanese importations of ‘a huge
variety of Anglo-American cultural products’ (Tatsumi 2000: 113),
including numerous literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction. In
turn, this new and, given Japan’s steady re-emergence as a global