youtube forcing japanese music down your throat

luka

Well-known member
a much kinder, more human future than those proffered by the likes of Dubai and Shanghai.
 

version

Well-known member
I remember seeing people on the cyberpunk subreddit or some other cyberpunk thing marveling at Kowloon's Walled City, Chungking Mansions etc as though it wouldn't be awful to actually have to live in them and you'd be so into the "a e s t h e t i c" you wouldn't give a shit.
 

version

Well-known member
Reminds me of a guy I went to school with complaining about Cuba being modernised because it would ruin the atmosphere if he ever went there on holiday. Like it was a theme park or something.
 

luka

Well-known member
it's central to both the cyberpunk and the vapourwave aesthetics. it's a kind of lost future.

whole generation of people who fell in love with anime characters instead of Disney princesses probably feeds into this too
 

version

Well-known member
The anime thing's crazy. Obviously it's been around for decades, but it feels as though it suddenly exploded.
 

version

Well-known member
A generation of kids growing up on Pokémon probably had something to do with it. That was the first I came into contact with. Everyone in my primary school was obsessed with the cards, games and TV show.
 

Trillhouse

Well-known member
Yeah, anime plays a big part as well. It's another thing that definitely found it's home online, from the fan-subbers to the whole counterculture aspect of it. Now it's everywhere.
 

version

Well-known member
I think basing a bunch of the shows around games was a stroke of genius. You hook people into not just the show, but also trading card games, handheld games. An entire interactive universe.
 

Trillhouse

Well-known member
I think basing a bunch of the shows around games was a stroke of genius. You hook people into not just the show, but also trading card games, handheld games. An entire interactive universe.
Is it actually any good? I have never pokemoned
 

version

Well-known member
I enjoyed it at the time. It was twenty-odd years ago though. I dunno what it's like now.
 

woops

is not like other people
classic william gibson quote and trope

I wish I had a thousand-yen note for every journalist who, over the past decade, has asked me whether Japan is still as futurologically sexy as it seemed to be in the ’80s. If I did, I’d take one of those spotlessly lace-upholstered taxis over to the Ginza and buy my wife a small box of the most expensive Belgian chocolates in the universe.

the answer obviously is no.

i was never a big anime fan but i had a heavy dose of japan fascination, had to visit before i die. it was more the music culture that really sold me, boredoms, japanoise and all that
 

Trillhouse

Well-known member
I enjoyed it at the time. It was twenty-odd years ago though. I dunno what it's like now.
I mean, as trends that young kids get obsessed with it at least seems to have led somewhere somewhat culturally rewarding I guess. Fidget spinners are definitely a dead end & I'm not sure where all the 2020 Fortnite obsessed youngsters will end up.
My nephew invited me to the Diplo concert in Fortnite the other day. It was an interesting experience. I have to admit that as I followed him excitedly bounding and bouncing through the garish island, making our way to the 'concert area', as the music grew louder and the trickle of individuals turned into a sea of fluorescent avatars, it did give me a little frisson mixed with nostalgia for those early first experiences of going out raving or to festivals.
 

version

Well-known member
It's interesting if you go back to stuff like Die Hard and American Psycho and pay attention to how Japan's discussed -- I think at one point a character in the latter claims the Japanese will own everything by the end of the 90s. I wonder whether that future failing to materialise is partly why Americans are now so enamored with Japanese culture. They're no longer a threat.
 

luka

Well-known member
n the 1970s and 1980s, the waning fortunes of heavy industry in the United States prompted layoffs and hiring slowdowns just as counterpart businesses in Japan were making major inroads into U.S. markets. Nowhere was this more visible than in the automobile industry, where the lethargic Big Three (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) watched as their former customers bought Japanese imports from Honda, Subaru, Mazda, and Nissan, a consequence of the 1973 and 1979 energy crisis. (When Japanese automakers were establishing their inroads into the USA and Canada. Isuzu, Mazda, and Mitsubishi had joint partnerships with a Big Three manufacturer (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) where its products were sold as captives). The anti-Japanese sentiment manifested itself in occasional public destruction of Japanese cars, and in the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American beaten to death when he was mistaken to be Japanese.

Other highly symbolic deals — including the sale of famous American commercial and cultural symbols such as Columbia Records, Columbia Pictures, 7-Eleven, and the Rockefeller Center building to Japanese firms — further fanned anti-Japanese sentiment.

Popular culture of the period reflected American's growing distrust of Japan.[citation needed] Futuristic period pieces such as Back to the Future Part II and RoboCop 3 frequently showed Americans as working precariously under Japanese superiors. The film Blade Runner showed a futuristic Los Angeles clearly under Japanese domination (with a Japanese majority population and culture), perhaps a reference to the alternate world presented in The Man in the High Castle written by Philip K. Dick, the same author on which the film was based, in which Japan had won World War II. Criticism was also lobbied in many novels of the day. Author Michael Crichton wrote Rising Sun, a murder mystery (later made into a feature film) involving Japanese businessmen in the U.S. Likewise, in Tom Clancy's book, Debt of Honor, Clancy implies that Japan's prosperity is due primarily to unequal trading terms, and portrays Japan's business leaders acting in a power hungry cabal.

As argued by Marie Thorsten, however, Japanophobia mixed with Japanophilia during Japan's peak moments of economic dominance during the 1980s. The fear of Japan became a rallying point for techno-nationalism, the imperative to be first in the world in mathematics, science and other quantifiable measures of national strength necessary to boost technological and economic supremacy. Notorious "Japan-bashing" took place alongside the image of Japan as superhuman, mimicking in some ways the image of the Soviet Union after it launched the first Sputnik satellite in 1957: both events turned the spotlight on American education. American bureaucrats purposely pushed this analogy. In 1982, Ernest Boyer, a former U.S. Commissioner of Education, publicly declared that, "What we need is another Sputnik" to re-boot American education, and that "maybe what we should do is get the Japanese to put a Toyota into orbit."[24] Japan was both a threat and a model for human resource development in education and the workforce, merging with the image of Asian-Americans as the "model minority."

Both the animosity and super-humanizing which peaked in the 1980s, when the term "Japan bashing" became popular, had largely faded by the late 1990s. Japan's waning economic fortunes in the 1990s, known today as the Lost Decade, coupled with an upsurge in the U.S. economy as the Internet took off largely crowded anti-Japanese sentiment out of the popular media.
 
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