Page 74 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 61

economic power, increasingly expansive consumer base impacted how
numerous Western and Japanese authors and filmmakers imagined the
shape and content of multiple genres, especially those dealing with the
fantastic. Takayuki Tatsumi describes this symbiotic relationship in
‘Generations and Controversies: An Overview of Japanese Science
Fiction, 1957-1997’:

Given that science fiction is a literature reflecting the frontiers of techno-
capitalism, it was inevitable that Japanese writers of the 1960s would follow
the original literary examples produced by the Pax Americana in the West. In
the 80s…a revolutionary paradigm shift took place: Anglo-American writers
began appropriating Japanese images as often as the reverse, while Japanese
writers came to understand that writing post-cyberpunk science fiction meant
locating the radically science fictional within the semiosis of ‘Japan’. Of
course, Anglo-American repre-sentations of Japan appeal to readers largely by
distorting Japanese culture, much as the Japanese people in the 50s and
60s…unwittingly misread their Occidentalism as genuine internationalism.
(113)

To this day, science fiction and horror texts emerging on both sides of the
Pacific frequently reflect complex economic, cultural, and historical
tensions. Analysing representations of human (and posthuman)
embodiment within these texts provides a method for gaining insight into
identity politics on the local, national, and trans-national level.
Furthermore, in both Japanese and Western science fiction, the
dominant tropology of scientific extrapolation provides compelling
insight into larger societal concerns related to technological advancement.
If, as Elizabeth Anne Hull and Mark Seigel argue, modern Japanese
industrialisation occurred ‘as a defense’ against Western ‘exploitation’
(1989: 262), then the cyberpunk aspects of Naked Blood reveal not only
cultural concerns over the extent to which technology has impacted
and/or may impact how Japanese people view both their own bodies and
their relationship to the larger social body, but also a compelling
ambivalence, on the part of Sato as an artist, towards the infusion of
technology in society. As Thomas Weisser and Yuko Mihara Weisser
have noted, ‘electronic tools and media gadgets’ are crucial props in
many of Sato’s films. ‘Besides being critical of… “dehumanizing pop
culture”’, they argue, ‘[Sato] is fascinated by it’ (1998: 463). The extent