Neo-Tokyo Ideal cities in Japanese cyberpunk anime

Chris Cornelissen 24-01-2012

UD 4 - Tutors: DaeWha Kang & Monika Bilska

UCL - The Bartlett School of ArchitectureMArch Urban Design 11-12 BENVUD 1 - History and Theory

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Table of contents

Introduction 5

1. Context: Cyberpunk Anime 6

1.1 Anime in Japan 6

1.2 Cyberpunk cities 7

2. Neo-Tokyo: Ideal city in contrasts 8

2.1 Megacity/Individual 8

2.2 Complex/Simple 9

2.3 Hi/Lo Tech 11

2.4 Real/Virtual 12

2.5 Horizontal/Vertical 13

2.6 Apocalypse/Rebuilding 14

2.7 Utopian/Dystopian 17

3. Conclusions 18

Bibliography 19

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Introduction

Dark, narrow, streets. People rushing. Rain. Neon. Cyborgs. Flying cars. Giant robots. Skyscrapers. An endless skyline. Destruction. Construction. Danger. Opportunity.Is this the Tokyo of the future? A large part of Japan’s population must have an image like this in their head, fed to their imaginations by numerous comics and animations, manga and anime. Japan, to many the example of a futuristic country, is the logical birthplace of these fantasies. Familiar with disaster, used to rebuilding itself, used to imagining the future.

It seems a very dark image of the future, dystopian rather than utopian. Technology plays a large part in this Tokyo, often called Neo-Tokyo or something similar (New Tokyo, Tokyo-3), but what might seem like a celebration of new technologies at first, turns out to be an apocalyptic vision on how it brings our society down. We see cyborgs struggle with their identity, we see giant robots fighting with even larger creatures, we see dictatorships trying to use technology to control their population, we see skyscrapers higher than ever, in their downfall destroying more than ever.It’s not always progress in Neo-Tokyo. Streets look darker, the rich are richer and the poor poorer, the city is controlled by just a few, time seems to have brought not only solutions but even more problems.

Why then, is Neo-Tokyo the place to start looking for the ideal city? It is almost an inevitable urge. You know nobody would describe Neo-Tokyo as ideal, but somehow it is fascinating. Is there something we must learn from Dystopia to be able to construct Utopia? Or isn’t there such a black and white division? Is it the contrasts, the fact that without the one the other can’t exist, the careful balance between excitement and security, between danger and safety, that draws us to Neo-Tokyo?

This essay will explore these contrasts, try to unravel how they contribute or constitute the ideal, as well as give a brief context on where Neo-Tokyo came from, its cyberpunk characteristics and its anime precedents.Ultimately this doesn’t give a manual on how to construct the ideal city. It gives an idea of a country’s communal imagination and the relevance of having one. It shows the ambiguity of the concept of the ideal and, hopefully, direction on how to design to create something that might approach the ideal, ambiguous, balancing different contrasts, and always utopian.

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1. Context: Cyberpunk Anime

1.1 Anime in Japan

As a medium, this essay primarily deals with animated film, or more specifically anime, its Japanese equivalent. This is to be able to set a clear framework and because of the spatial, 3-dimensional experience animation can offer. Furthermore, anime seems to have penetrated global culture more than its paper equivalent manga, which has more competition in the immensely popular superhero comics of which countless have been turned into Hollywood blockbusters over the last years. Popular animation from Europe and the United States is (still) primarily focused on children, with Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks dominating the field.Animation can envision cities without being restricted by reality, or the current state of special effects, like live action films, or by words, like books. ‘It may be that animation in general -and perhaps anime in particular- is the ideal artistic vehicle for expressing the hopes and nightmares of our uneasy contemporary world’. (Napier 2005, 11)

While manga and anime (animated manga) has only seen its great rise in popularity and manifestation in global pop culture over the last 50 years, Japan has a very old tradition in making illustrations which can be seen as early manga. Most famous example are probably the prints made by Japanese artist Hokusai in the 18th and 19th century, with the ‘Great Wave off Kanagawa’ still being used as a national symbol.

Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa, 1830-1833, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa.jpg [Retrieved on 23-01-2012]

For Japan, manga has always been a way of reflecting upon its own society, now and in the future. When their primary means of living shifted from the rural to the urban environment, manga started to be used as a means of reflecting upon their new forms of living. Japan’s rapid industrialisation and economic growth after World War II led to the emergence of manga as we know it now. The occupation of Japan by the US after WWII was the beginning of a more Western-oriented society and under influence of Disney and other Western comics and animation, manga and anime started developing its own distinct style.

One of the artists at the forefront of this development was Osamu Tezuka. His Astro Boy series, started in 1951, about a little boy/superpowered robot, are an example of a new style of drawing and storytelling, and form the beginning of the science fiction/robot manga subgenre this essay revolves around. Based on stories he heard about Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, he also drew the manga Metropolis, a significant precedent to the cyberpunk manga of the 1980s and 90s, made into anime in 2001.

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Osamo Tezuka’s Astroboy, http://www.japanese-arts.net/comics/images/tezuka-astro.jpg [Retrieved on 23-01-2012]

The influence of the West is still apparent in manga and anime. Characters generally look more Western than Japanese, anime doesn’t seem to reinforce Japanese cultural identity, instead it is described as being stateless. ‘Anime may be seen as a dark mirror that reflects japan to the West and to some extent vice-versa, in that anime also gives Japanese viewers a distinctive vision of non-Japanese worlds (Napier 2005, 24) This might explain anime’s huge popularity outside Japan, the statelessness can provide an escape from any reality.

The popularity, and with that the significance, of manga and anime kept increasing, by 1988 roughly 40 percent of Japanese studio releases were animated (Napier 2005, 15). 1988 is also the year the immensely successful anime Akira was released, featuring a vision of a post World War III Tokyo in 2019 - Neo Tokyo.

Manga and anime have always been important in showing Japan’s hopes and nightmares, and after WWII they can be considered a global phenomenon, reflecting and influencing not only Japan. Another distinct influence from the West, cyberpunk, can be seen in the selected anime.

1.2 Cyberpunk cities

Next to being products of Japanese anime culture, Neo-Tokyo and its subsequent anime representations of Tokyo are heavily influenced by a primarily American phenomenon called cyberpunk.Cyberpunk finds its origins, amongst others, in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Cyberpunk ‘blends ideas about the potential of information technologies with nighttown visions of urban life and a hard-driving rock-and-roll sensibility’ (Abbott 2007, 124).Dick sketches a post-war devastated Earth, covered in dust and deserted by the majority of the population for other planets. People that remain are either too much affected by the dust or too stubborn to leave. The book is set in a future San Francisco, largely abandoned and slowly deteriorating. The book added to progress and technology philosophical questions about how far we can go with technology, dealing with a blurring line between man and machine. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, loosely based on Dick’s novel, shifts the setting to Los Angeles, the city that, certainly at that time, seemed to epitomise the future. (Abbott 2007, 127) Scott’s Los Angeles shows an intriguing ‘mix of asian and latin american influences with european-american cityscapes’ (Orbaugh 2006, 89) in a dark setting comparable to the film noir cinema of the 1950s.

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Blade Runner, 1982, http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2009/11/5/1257432294732/The-futuristic-police-sta-001.jpg [Retrieved on 23-01-2012]

The selected anime representations of Tokyo are heavily influenced by these American novels and film, often combining Blade Runner’s ‘memorably textured dark mise-en-scene’ and ‘dark, urban setting of rain-lashed skyscrapers’ (Napier 2005, 122) with Neuromancer’s world of computers, hackers and other futuristic technology.‘Cyberpunk cities are fast-paced and often dangerous to individual characters, but they are the centres of economic and social change. They are places of motion, change, and opportunity that are ‘exciting and deadly at the same time’ (Abbott 2007, 125) Neo-Tokyo is shaped by these contrasts, it is a city that, with the real Tokyo as starting point, has taken these cyberpunk precedents, which were themselves inspired by Japanese cities, and combined it with a long tradition of anime.

2. Neo-Tokyo: Ideal city in contrasts

In this discovery of the ideal city, Tokyo is chosen as a case study. Not the actual city of Tokyo, but Tokyo as imagined in anime, not restricted by reality, free to be drawn as any vision of a future city. The real city of Tokyo is a city of contrasts. The clockwork metropolis is extremely efficient, clean and organised and at the same time chaotic, filled with neon, pachinko and a web of indecipherable small streets. Its anime versions show similar and new ambiguities which form they key to their appeal. In total seven films are included, all but one explicitly naming Tokyo as a setting. Starting point is the Neo-Tokyo of Katsuhiro Ohtomo’s 1988 Akira, ever-popular milestone in Japanese film history. The others are Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 Ghost In The Shell and its 2001 sequel Innocence, perfect examples of ‘existential cyberpunk’, Rintaro’s 2001 Metropolis, the only film not being explicitly set in Tokyo (based on Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie with the same title), Masayuki, Tsurumaki and Anno’s 2007 and 2009 Evangelion 1.11 and 2.22 and Fumihiko Sori’s rather different depiction of Tokyo in 2007 Vexille. All anime cities are referred to as Neo-Tokyo when used collectively or as their actual names when used individually. Rather than being described separately, the cities are unraveled using the contrasts they show.

2.1 Megacity/Individual

In the near future, electrons and light flow freely, and corporate computer networks eclipse the stars. Despite great advances in computerisation, countries and races are not yet obsolete...Opening lines of Ghost In The Shell (1995)

When looking at images of Neo-Tokyo, one of the first remarkable characteristics is its scale. It is a megacity. It is much larger than the actual Tokyo. It seems the centre of the world, a city-state, a huge concentration of people, wealth, culture. Mentioning of anything outside this city-state in the films is rare, it is its own universe.

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In fast-growing Japan of the 1970s and 80s, this vision is comprehensible. Tokyo was already the biggest city in the world and still growing, consuming towns around it and connected to neighbouring cities with high-speed rail shinkansen trains, forming one urbanised stretch on the southern coast of Japan’s main island Honshu. This urbanised area can be seen as a mega region, a phenomenon happening in many urbanised areas around the world.1 Neo-Tokyo shows a possible future for these regions. An extra factor in the large scale is the forming and eventual take-over of (digital) networks, in some instances (The Net in Ghost In The Shell) mentioned as an all-encompassing and all-connecting entity, which, as mentioned above, is still not advanced enough to render countries and races obsolete. But the mentioning alone suggests that it will in the end. The development of digital networks suggests that the need to be in the city will diminish, still, in reality and in Neo-Tokyo, the city is more important than ever.

Digital networks contribute to the other end of the contrast, the focus on the individual as a possible reaction to the increasing size and massiveness of the city.With a growing role of social media, mobile phones and all kinds of iGadgets, there seems to be a desire of the individual to distinguish his/herself. In the highly collective Japanese society, the mobile phone has become the ultimate symbol of individuality (Ito 2005). The city is dominated by convenience stores, konbinis, that are tailored to the individual, selling one person meals and even functioning as the place to pick up packages and pay utility bills.

Neo-Tokyo too has many aspects of individuality. Story lines are highly individual and mostly deal with special agents on an individual assignment or, in Akira, teenage boys freeing themselves from ‘oppressive male adult authority structure of government, military, and the scientific establishment’ to ‘total diminishment of authority’. (Napier 2005, 44) The centralistic government is challenged by the individual. In the Evangelion series one small boy challenges the whole (post-apocalyptic) world, and his father. Cyborg Motoko of Ghost In The Shell mostly seems alone in het search for the elusive hacker Puppet Master.

Although the world’s urban population is still growing, Tokyo’s future in post-bubble Japan will be somewhat different. While digital networks are still developing at high pace, its population is ageing and expected to shrink in the next decades.2 This sets a new light on its future renderings. How to deal with a shrinking instead of growing city? Vexille, a recent anime (2007), shows an urbanised world, but a deserted Japan. It suggests a black and white division for city and non-city: shrinking means disappearance, grow or get left behind.

2.2 Complex/Simple

Completely in cyberpunk tradition, the cityscapes of Neo-Tokyo all seem incredibly complex. On street level, the abundance of people, signs, roads and other networks seems almost impermeable, the skylines show an incredible and endless array of skyscrapers. The city is modelled after the real Tokyo and other Asian metropoles like Hong Kong. In Ghost In The Shell, the director was looking for ‘a vision of the future that lies just beyond the landscape of reality.’ His vision of the future is apparently the existing Hong Kong, for him ‘Hong Kong was the equivalent of the Los Angeles of Blade Runner.’ (Napier 2005, 310-311) Another influence are Venturi and Scott Brown’s love for complexity and the city of Las Vegas, showing neon cityscapes and attention to detail and assemblage. (Abbott 2007, 126) Neo-Tokyo is a post-modern city, where less is a bore, diverse and complex.

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1 See also Florida, R., 2007, The Rise of the Mega Region, The Martin Prosperity Institute/University of Toronto

2 According to data from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/PLAN/DATA/10yearplan_data_19.pdf [Accessed 20-01-2012]

Complex cityscape of Neo-Tokyo in Ghost In The Shell

On the other hand, the universe of Neo-Tokyo is a very simple one. Society is structured in a very basic way, with an almost simplistic centralistic government that would be impossible to find in our current post-Arab spring, post-dictator world. In Neo-Tokyo this is directly translated in the cityscape, where the government is housed in a central part of the city with skyscrapers even bigger and more monumental than in the rest of the city. In Neo-Tokyo it was the government that caused the downfall of the city in World War III and it is the government that is bringing it down again.

Government headquarters in Akira

A comparable structure, in terms of government and city lay-out, can be found in Metropolis. Its leader has built a massive skyscraper called the Ziggurat, which he plans to use to control the city by means of a ‘super robot’ controlling a ‘super weapon’. The robot and the skyscraper are again the downfall of the city and the regime. Neo-Tokyo seems in need of a large, dominant enemy to fight against.

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The Ziggurat, Metropolis

The depiction of the future city is almost always one with hundreds of skyscrapers, flying cars and other technological novelties that have been in our imagination since Lang’s film Metropolis in the beginning of the previous century (1927). Neo-Tokyo’s complexity becomes simplicity when looked at over time, it hasn’t been reinvented for too long. Recent anime Vexille has an original vision on the future of Tokyo (the dominance of machines has resulted in Tokyo turning into a slum), but it’s depiction of other cities, in this case Los Angeles, is generic in showing a city dominated by skyscrapers and roads.The city’s image of complexity is in some cases used as a facade for simple structuring and in other as an outdated starting point. Still, in all cases there is the filmmaker’s intention to show Neo-Tokyo as a ambiguous, multilayered city.

Future Los Angeles in Vexille

2.3 Hi/Lo Tech

‘If a technological feat is possible, man will do it. Almost as though it’s wired into the core of our being’Motoko in Ghost In The Shell (1995)

All selected cities are essentially technopoli, they celebrate technological progress, extrapolate the possibilities of current technologies and are inventive in showing what else could be possible. Robot technology has become standard and questions are asked about the implications of a world in which

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humans and robots co-exist. We can see giant robots fighting for the future of humanity and a city that has been turned into a giant superstructure that is able to sink underground, while on the surface a defence system emerges. (Evangelion). We can see robots used to assist in everyday life (Metropolis) and part-robot humans forming the city’s police force (Ghost In The Shell). On the other hand no filmmaker discarded the traditional and lo-tech, often mixing it visibly and invisibly with modern technology. They are all clearly excited about the potentials of technology, but they also want to show us its negative implications. The technopolis becomes technophobic when a robot is built to control the population (Metropolis), or when machines overtake humans to build their own city (Vexille). Technology is of great use but can also mean the downfall of Neo-Tokyo.

City built by and for machines, Vexille

2.4 Real/Virtual

‘Virtual experiences, dreams...all data that exists is both reality and fantasy’Batou in Ghost In The Shell (1995)

Neo-Tokyo’s obsession with technology opens up the question of how to deal with a new, virtual world. When computers and the internet become more dominant, the city is extended with a non-physical, other world, that takes over some of its traditional functions. How does Neo-Tokyo deal with this contrast?

Ghost in the Shell takes this question on as main topic of the film. A cyborg, whose only human part is her brain, going after a hacker, in the meantime questioning her existence and authenticity.

The city she uses, referenced as New Tokyo, is a city that resembles the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, both drawing inspiration from Hong Kong. The city is mostly rainy, dark, gritty, real. At first glance, it is a recognisable city, used by normal people, having normal jobs. A key scene shows how future technologies have become part of it. In a seemingly normal car chase, cyborg Motoko goes after a garbage truck that seems to be going about its normal business. But one of the truckers is hacked by the Puppet Master and is, without him knowing, performing tasks for him, using public phones and other common networks of the city. The city that seemed so familiar has at the same time merged with technology, manifesting itself in the very common, very real parts of the city. Everybody has become part of the networks of the city. ‘People do not just move through or jack temporarily into the networks of the city, but have become intristic, inextricable parts of those networks, and this change has become involuntary as city, technology and body have evolved together.’ (Orbaugh 2006, 96)

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In the end the film takes the question of real and virtual a step further. The hacker appears not to be a person but a computer program that wants to merge with the cyborg as a way of reproduction, to create variation, evolution. This fusing of body and machine completely changes the city. The closing lines of the movie summarise this, the merged cyborg asking herself Where shall I go now? The net is limitless’.

2.5 Horizontal/Vertical

There's another level below this? How far down does this place go?Hige-Oyaji in Metropolis (2001)

In the structure of the anime cities, there is strong emphasis on vertical organisation (underground/above ground, skyscrapers) and horizontal organisations (transportation networks, digital networks)

Verticality in Neo-Tokyo is mainly used to emphasise the scale of the city, to show that might not be just a city, but something bigger, something dominating the country or the world as a city-state.

Vertical organisation has a direct impact on how the city is used. Ground level is no longer the only place of action. Already a phenomenon in Tokyo, due to its high density and high prices, shops, restaurants and other facilities have moved up and underground, creating multi-layered street life.

Public space high above ground in Akira

Earlier was shown that the highest, most imposing skyscrapers represent power. In the totalitarian regime of Neo-Tokyo, height is power. This is not unlike one of the functions of the skyscraper: showing itself to the city. Where in capitalist real Tokyo this role is mostly played by big corporations, in Neo-Tokyo the government is dominant.Similarly, height in the city represents social status. Metropolis is divided in different levels: the upper levels are reserved for rich humans, the lower levels for poor humans, of which many have lost their jobs because of robot labour. The underground levels are occupied by human shaped androids and the lower underground levels by trash collecting robots. (Orbaugh 2006, 87) Of course, a large part of the story is set in the more intriguing underground levels.

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Underground zones of Metropolis: above ground; zone 1; zone 2 - power plant; zone 3 - sewage treatment

This social structuring of the city shows a familiar pattern, in line with Saskia Sassen’s theory about global cities (1991), where New York, London and Tokyo dominate the world’s economy and sevices. City-state Neo-Tokyo can be seen as an extreme version. Global cities show the ‘emergence of a supporting class of low paid service workers to tend the everyday needs of that elite’, ‘dual labor markets for elite workers and support workers’, and the disappearance of a middle class - ‘historically the core constituency for urban and regional planning’ (Abbott 2007, 125) Global cities are the control centres of our world, they are the place to be, politically, culturally, economically. At the same time familiar problems of the city are magnified, creating greater divisions between people.

In terms of horizontal organisation Neo-Tokyo is dominated by computer and transportation networks. The internet manifests itself not in a very visible way, but, as explained earlier, is everywhere and connects everyone. Faster and better modes of transportation contribute to the horizontal and vertical expansion of the city. Flying cars are standard in Neo-Tokyo, giving a new dimension to transportation and highways are a vital part in the image of the city. Altogether a feeling is created that transportation has improved so much, the city could stretch out endlessly.

2.6 Apocalypse/Rebuilding

‘Neo Tokyo is going to change. In all respects, this city is saturated. It's like an overripe fruit. And within it is a new seed. We only need to wait for the wind which will make it fall. The wind called Akira!’Mr Nezu in Akira (1988)

Apocalypse and destruction are main themes in Neo-Tokyo. To all filmmakers, the future is uncertain. Technology is developing so fast that it can only lead to our downfall, seems to be the general thought, the Tokyo of the future is likely to be built on its own ruins.

One of the reasons for this remarkable pessimistic outlook on the future is probably Japan’s and Tokyo’s inevitable connection with destruction. Tokyo is built on the ruins of the Great Kantō

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Earthquake in 1923, devastating the city and killing more than 100,000 people, and of Second World War bombings, destroying over half of the city and again killing 100,000s of people. Japan had to suffer the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more recently the Tōhoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami. The city and country are used to rebuilding itself.

As apocalypse can be seen as an extrapolation of the dystopian aspects within the city, it can help identifying its counterpart, the ideal, by answering the questions: what leads to the destruction of the city, and how is it rebuilt?

Akira’s Neo-Tokyo is built on the edge of the crater that was left when the city was destroyed by the mysterious force Akira, result of a secret government experiment, and is destroyed by the same force at the end of the movie. The way the city is rebuilt in first instance seems a similar but bigger, worse version of the one before destruction. ‘The movie's nihilistic celebration of abjection and finally of extinction suggest no hope for change within the actual fabric of society’ (Napier 2005, 48) When the city is destroyed for the second time, there seems hope for a new beginning. Characters express their desire to start over, they call the city saturated and were waiting for a new start.Seen in its 1988 context, when the movie was made, there is an analogy with the state of affairs in Japan. The country was at the top of its economic power, just before the burst of the bubble. The filmmakers might have seen the the bubble coming. In a way the city was like an overripe fruit, waiting to go bad, making the film a call for a re-imagining of society. Since Japan is still in a recession and faces new challenges of population decline, this is still an unanswered question. What should post-bubble Japan look like?

Neo-Tokyo, post-apocalypse in Akira

Tokyo in Evangelion is destroyed for similar reasons. Government experiments with monstrous creatures called Angels, along with natural disasters, bring the city down, showing a very contemporary fear of human impact on the planet. The rebuilt city looks on first glance exactly like the existing Tokyo. Only when it is attacked, the city sinks underground and transforms into a defence system. It has become a city built for survival, built out of fear, nostalgic for the old Tokyo.

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Destroyed and rebuilt Tokyo-3 in Vexille

Metropolis is destroyed by the weapon to control its population, built by its own regime. What brings it down is the human side of the robot meant to control the weapon. The will of the main character to rebuild society, to absolve the class differences within the city, contribute to the effect he has on the robot and indirectly to the destruction of the Metropolis.

The Metropolis destroyed

Vexille shows Tokyo, after machines, no longer in need of human beings, have turned it into a slum. The rest of the country is left to be a desert, dominated by destructive scrap metal. For themselves, the machines built a high-tech city on an island off the coast of Tokyo, connected by underground tubes. Tokyo itself is reduced to a city without any technology, a slum of which the occupants are deteriorating robots, formerly humans affected by a robot-made virus. Still, the main character, coming from high-tech, futuristic Los Angeles, remarks upon her sight of the city: ‘This place is so full of life. I’ve never seen anything like it. It makes me nostalgic somehow.’Probably affected by the negative role of the robots in Japan and the overload of hi-tech in Los Angeles, she seems fed up of anything artificial. The humanoid robots in the slum are better in creating a lively atmosphere than the actual humans in Los Angeles. ‘Your city seems to celebrate the splendour of what you’ve lost.’ In a good example of technophobia, the slum is celebrated for its liveliness.

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Tokyo as a slum in Vexille

Only the Tokyo of Ghost In The Shell survives, but in turn deals with the dissolve of the individual, into the technological or the Net.The government or the advancement of machines are the main reasons for destruction, and when the city is built up it is either a worse version of itself, or a nostalgic, defensive copy. The ideal is found in the destruction, the chance to start over. Suddenly nature shows itself (Metropolis), a slum is preferred over the city (Vexille), or a different universe is the source for new hope (Akira).

2.7 Utopian/Dystopian

Hmm... it takes light to create shadow, I guess...Hige-Oyaji in Metropolis (2001)

Neo Tokyo is infested by motorcycle gangs (Akira), in desperate need of a Mobile Armored Riot Police (Ghost In The Shell), under constant threats of enormous robots (Evangelion) or intelligent machines (Vexille). It was never intended to be a utopian city.The makers extrapolated the problems of our existing cities, and envisioned a self-destructive city-state. But in spite of all its potential dangers, they chose the city, their imagining of a future Tokyo, for their stories, giving away their fascination and their view of a future dominated by cities and technology. They created a vision of the future and could share it with many others through its medium film, giving it relevance as an ideal. Millions were attracted by the mix of danger and opportunity, chaos and excitement, technology and destruction.

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3. Conclusions

Neo-Tokyo’s ideals can be found in its contrasts. It is a city so big that it is almost encompasses the globe, expanding in all directions, up and down, East and West, but at the same time it is highly individual. Its workings are complex and its organisation simple. It loves and fears technology. It expands into the virtual realm. It is located on the edge of destruction, constantly rebuilding and reinventing itself. It is a dangerous, exciting city, dynamic, never the same, utopian and dystopian at the same time.

Although mostly drawn up more than 25 years ago, Neo-Tokyo can still be very relevant for todays cities. Its scale resembles current mega regions and global cities, it shows similar social problems and solutions for cities that expand horizontally and vertically. In our age of internet and smartphones, we can learn from its individualisation, from the array of gadgets every citizen of Neo-Tokyo has available to shape his or her ideal city, and the individual’s and the city’s integration with The Net. Technology has permeated the city visibly and invisibly, leaving it recognisable but changing it considerable, adding an extra, virtual layer. We can learn from the questions Neo-Tokyo asks with the progression of technology.Neo-Tokyo is dominated by a small cluster in the city with the highest buildings. In this case they are government buildings, in our cities they are something else. Resistance in Neo-Tokyo against this oppression leads to destruction. We see resistance in the form of occupations, but the same longing for a new ideal.

Neo-Tokyo still leaves many questions unanswered. What happens after the bubble, after destruction, after occupation? Maybe a new generation of anime makers can begin to find answers.In the meantime we look at Neo-Tokyo, dangerous, dystopian, incomprehensible but exciting, full of opportunities and ideal because it’s often so obviously not.

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Bibliography

Literature

Abbott, C., 2007, Cyberpunk Cities : Science Fiction Meets Urban Theory, Journal of Planning Education and Research, pp.122-131

Dick, P. K., 1968, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Gollancz, London

Gibson, W., 1984, Neuromancer, Voyager, London

Ito, M., 2005, Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth, and the Re-Placement of Social Contact [pdf], available at http://www.itofisher.com/mito/archives/mobileyouth.pdf [Accessed 20-01-2010]

Lamarre, T., The First Time as Farce: Digital Animation and the Repetition of Cinema, in: Brown, S.T. (ed), 2006, Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, Palgrave Macmillan, New York/Hampshire

Napier, S. J., 2005, Anime from Akira to Howl’s moving castle: experiencing contemporary Japanese animation, updated ed., Palgrave Macmillan, New York/Hampshire

Orbaugh, S., Frankenstein and the Cyborg Metropolis: The Evolution of Body and City in Science Fiction Narratives, in: Brown, S.T. (ed), 2006, Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, Palgrave Macmillan, New York/Hampshire

Sassen, S., 1991, The global city: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press, New Jersey

Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D., Izenour, S., 1977, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd ed., MIT Press, Cambridge

Web

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mangahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shellhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_(film)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(anime)

Films

Akira, 1988. Directed by Katsuhiro Ohtomo. Japan: Bandai Visual

Blade Runner, 1982. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Warner Bros

Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone (original title: Evangerion shin gekijôban: Jo), 2007. Directed by Masayuki, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Hideaki Anno. Japan: Gainax, Khara Corporation

Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance (original title: Evangerion shin gekijôban: Ha), 2009. Directed by Masayuki, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Hideaki Anno. Japan: Gainax, Khara Corporation

Ghost In The Shell (original title: Kôkaku kidôtai), 1995. Directed by Mamoru Oshii. Japan: Bandai Visual

Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, 2004. Directed by Mamoru Oshii. Japan: Bandai Visual

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Metropolis, 1927. Directed by Fritz Lang. Germany: Universum Film

Metropolis, 2001. Directed by Rintaro. Japan: Bandai Visual

Vexille (original title: Bekushiru: 2077 Nihon sakoku), 2007. Directed by Fumihiko Sori. Japan: Avex Entertainment, CCRE, Oxybot

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