Orientalism in Cyberpunk

Spend a minute in the Cyberpunk subgenre and you're likely to find some aspect of the work that is nominally East Asian. Neuromancer by William Gibson opens on the imagination of a futuristic Chiba, Japan; Blade Runner (1982) works with the inspiration of "Hong Kong on a really bad day" [x]; the 2017 movie adaptation of Ghost in the Shell works with everything from Japanese sensibilities to a story from a manga written by a Japanese man, Masamune Shirow. Cyberpunk as a genre seems to take its visual cues from a perception of the Chinatowns that exist in major U.S. cities, places of en-masse freeform convergences covered in neon signs, cuneiform and kana, and in the case of Seattle's International District, a historic archway that sits grandly over King Street.

But in a setting that draws so heavily on East Asian culture, why are all the characters white?

Let's take a minute to define "orientalism." The term in its current usage was coined by Edward Said in his book on the topic, and used to define a practice by Western artists and scholars of interpreting Asian cultures from the outside rather than interacting with the people who are a part of those cultures. From Edward Said's Orientalism:

"Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact." –p. 20-21

Edward Said makes clear the crux of this article: Orientalism as a practice puts the author on the outside of the culture. It allows for Asian cultures to be examined, studied, and voiced by people who distance themselves from the very cultures and people they scrutinize.

One of the people credited with solidifying the cyberpunk genre is Bruce Sterling, who worked contemporaneously with William Gibson. Sterling’s influences include J. G. Ballard, a new wave science fiction author who wrote prominently in the 1960s and into the 70s. Ballard was born and raised in an international settlement in Shanghai, China, which shaped his experiences and informed his semi-autobiographical work Empire of the Sun. The futuristic Japanese setting of Chiba City and the anomalous prominence of non-Asian characters in William Gibson’s Neuromancer riffs on this situation, but cannot be said to operate on the same lived experiences, as Gibson grew up in South Carolina.

Nevertheless, Gibson wrote Neuromancer. It became the defining work of the cyberpunk genre, and orientalism proliferated through the genre. This happened contemporaneously with the debut of Blade Runner (1982), which premiered as Gibson was writing Neuromancer.

These two works lent their atmosphere to the rest of the genre with a force that carried as far as the Matrix trilogy in 1999. Note the stylistic choices of the "digital rain" that represents the code of the Matrix: half-width kana characters tossed in with letters and numbers that we recognize in Western culture, proceeding from top to bottom as is common in Japanese writing. Despite this aesthetic commitment to Japan, a grand total of four actors throughout the entire Matrix trilogy are of East Asian descent.

Here we see a complex relationship between the authors of these works and the cultures in which they, the works, are immersed. Let’s take the Chiba City of William Gibson’s Neuromancer for an example: the main character, Case, is a white man living in the underworld of a human ecology that ostensibly should put him in contact with almost exclusively Japanese characters, but almost every character with which Case interacts is either European or unspecified — and this is important, because the only two explicitly Japanese characters that Case encounters are exactly that: explicit. Blade Runner features a scene similar for its cinematic intention of distance from Asian culture at the beginning of the movie: Deckard orders noodles, can’t communicate with the East Asian store owner, sighs resignedly, and takes his bowl of noodles. Moments later, when a pair of police officers speak to him in Mandarin, the store owner begins translating for Deckard with a firm grasp on the English language. Therefore, despite the apparent immersion of the characters in East Asian culture, we as the audience are, like the characters, distanced from that very same culture, set aside from something that then by comparison seems homogenous.

Orientalism has existed in Western culture for centuries, but the cyberpunk genre exemplifies it with a particular poignancy.

Don’t take my investigation of the orientalism present in these works as a defamation: I ate up Neuromancer in a weekend, annotated it to hell and back, and thoroughly enjoyed every second of it, in no small part because it was a stimulating book with which to engage. I believe that lines of critique such as these are vital to the consumption of media and the subsequent production that we undertake when we make anything from fanfiction to novels.