Actually existing dystopia: imagining Japan through science fiction under late capitalism

Japanese science fiction has become a global cultural phenomenon since the Second World War, evident in the popularity of novels like Sakyo Komatsu’s Japan Sinks (1973) and kaiju films such as Godzilla (1954). Yet, as these examples highlight, the Japanese science fiction genre has been dominated by dystopian “imaginations of disaster”1. Postwar Japanese science fiction and cyberpunk genres at once both reflect long-standing anxieties of the demise of Japanese cultural exceptionality in the confrontation with Western (capitalist) modernity since the 1910s, most famously articulated by Kyoto School debates about ‘overcoming modernity’ in the 1940s,2 yet also indicate a reimagining of Japan, from the Western perspective, as exemplifying “the postmodern present and near-future of the West”3, a “techno-Orientalist”4 imagination that has nevertheless been appropriated and rearticulated in Japanese science fiction itself.

Sato has argued that the fusion of American cyberpunk ideas with Japanese modernization has facilitated the reconstruction of an imagined Japanese unique identity (or, Japanism) that associates Japan with technology and correlates its technological modernization to a reclamation of its past.5 However, the uniqueness of Japan comes from its own monstrosity, its representativeness of a world falling apart. Mark Fisher, the British critical theorist, conceptualised the idea of ‘capitalist realism’, where, under contemporary late capitalism, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”6. Imagining disaster through science fiction becomes a cultural reproduction of a resurgent, techno-capitalist Japan from the 1980s where Japan itself was reimagined as the ‘terminator’, the monster, of world capitalism.7 Dystopia was thus “both frightening and exciting”8; Japanese science fiction epitomises what Walter Benjamin noted in 1936 where humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure”.9

Just as Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse described the ‘end of utopia’, where society could now actually achieve ‘utopian’ social transformation and thus negate utopia’s inherent impossibility,10 Japanese science fiction represents an ‘end of dystopia’. Now, dystopia is no longer imaginative but instead “an extrapolation or exacerbation of [reality] rather than an alternative to it”.11 In relating Japanese identity to science fiction themes of hyper-capitalism and technology, through techno-Orientalist tropes, Japan becomes an ‘actually existing dystopia’ where science fiction is no longer an imagination, but merely an extension of reality. In this way, postwar Japanese science fiction, in its imaginations of disaster, paradoxically both reflects the fears and anxieties of the realities of contemporary Japan, where Japanese culture and national essence is eroded by the onset of the ahistorical and culturally detached society of late capitalism and postmodernity, and simultaneously appropriates such dystopia by historically and culturally locating techno-capitalism in Japan in a rearticulation of Japanism as a unique ‘actually existing dystopia’. As Kawamura Takeshi, a contemporary Japanese playwright who gained notoriety in the 1980s for his dystopian and postmodern themes, has argued, “it is absolutely necessary for an age of monsters to put in an appearance” because “such an age has already come very close to us”.12

  1. Susan J. Napier, ‘Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira’, The Journal of Japanese Studies 19:2 (1993), pp.327-351. [↩]
  2. Kumiko Sato, ‘How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context’, Comparative Literature Studies, 41:3 (2004), pp.343-344. [↩]
  3. Ibid., p.347. [↩]
  4. David Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta Niu (eds), Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History and Media (New Brunswick, 2015). [↩]
  5. Sato, ‘How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism’, p.353. [↩]
  6. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, 2009), p.17. [↩]
  7. Napier, ‘Panic Sites’, p.349. [↩]
  8. Ibid. [↩]
  9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p.242. [↩]
  10. Herbert Marcuse, ‘The End of Utopia’, lecture delivered at the Free University of West Berlin, July 1967. [↩]
  11. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p.17. [↩]
  12. Peter Eckersall, ‘Japan as Dystopia: Kawamura Takeshi’s Daisan Erotica’, TDR 44:1 (2000), p.107. [↩]