Japanese Cyberpunk: A Beginner’s Guide

Cyberpunk touched down in Western cinema with the 1982 arrival of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, long considered one of the earliest pioneers of the sci-fi subgenre. However, across the Pacific, DIY Japanese filmmakers began experimenting with the metalwork and fleshy metamorphoses of cyberpunk, and as a result, produced much more hardcore creations than their Western contemporaries.

In the 1980s, a flourishing economy and entertainment market made Japan an important global center for art and technological innovation. Though Japan had the world’s second largest economy at this time—the sunset of the post-WWII “Japanese economic miracle”—anxieties surrounding rapid industrial change rippled through communities of Japanese youth and artists. Thus, many counterculture movements, including cyberpunk cinema, stemmed from fears of uncontrollable technology, as well as a distrust of authority; many Japanese citizens at the time were not fond of their nationalist prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, who played an instrumental role in changing the country’s economy and formed a strong alliance with President Reagan.

These anxieties manifested in a characteristic darkness that diverges from the vaporwave and neon-plastered cityscapes of American cyberpunk, which has often stereotyped Asian or Asian-coded cities (and its citizens) as sterile and unfeeling. Many Japanese cyberpunk films can be defined by similarly soulless megalopolises, yet pioneering filmmakers of the genre—such as Shinya Tsukamoto and Gakuryū Ishii—indulged in the grotesque underbelly of these futuristic worlds, often fetishizing machinery or the nauseating metamorphosis from man and machine—a journey that represented what many Japanese filmmakers at the time saw as blurring veil between the human and the artificial.

Our beginner’s guide to Japanese cyberpunk will help you immerse yourself in a subgenre that changed sci-fi forever. Each of these films offer a different approach to Japanese cyberpunk, varying in gore, visual style and thematic elements.

Burst City (1982)

japanese cyberpunk burst city

Many of the genre conventions of Japanese cyberpunk originated with Gakuryū Ishii’s third film—and it’s no surprise that the precursor to Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Akira is utter pandemonium. In an unrelenting array of anthemic musical numbers, a biker gang, a punk group and some construction workers team up to rebel against a Tokyo nuclear power plant, and to take down the man who runs it. Burst City’s fairly straightforward stomp on its police state is threaded in tandem through unrelenting mayhem and high-octane sounds. What Burst City lacks in cohesion it makes up for with its disorienting, nightmarish kick—trudging forward with unbound kinetic power as the dystopia surrounding it crumbles.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

In 1989, Japanese cyberpunk cinema found its unofficial mascot: A cursed businessman turned machine by a “metal fetishist.” Though not the first film categorized under the hardcore Japanese subgenre, the man-meets-machine tale of Tetsuo: The Iron Man from director Shinya Tsukamoto molded the genre. Tsukamoto funded the film himself and leaned on many of his friends from Tokyo’s underground theater scene to accomplish the project’s homemade gore. The visceral practical effects results in a particularly horrifying display of a man’s cursed evolution into a conglomeration of irons, drills, pipes, screws and wires. Coupled with a dissonant, metallic score, Tetsuo: The Iron Man experiments with the intersection of machines and human identities. Tsukamoto’s unnatural use of machinery in sex sequences is unlike anything else in sci-fi, inspiring provocative romantic elements in other films on this list.

964 Pinocchio (1991)

japanese cyberpunk

This incredibly unsettling adaptation of the classic Italian fairytale exchanges a wooden doll for a cyborg sex slave with a wiped memory. When his owners throw him onto the street due to his impotence, the sexbot forms a tight bond with Himiko, a homeless girl who maps the city for others who have had their memory wiped. 964 Pinocchio pushes its psychosexual perversions even further than Tetsuo, though its dizzying handheld camerawork and tightly-framed gore bears striking visual similarities to Tsukamoto’s 1989 film. It’s 97 minutes of vomitous, slobber-filled, bloody slop that make this an undeniably disgusting watch, yet Haji Suzuki’s unique physicality in embodying the titular cyborg produces many humorous moments. 964 Pinocchio leans into body horror more than many other Japanese cyberpunk movies, but its unorthodox imaginings of the human body’s limits make it a seminal cyberpunk fixture.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

By the 1990s, cyberpunk had already carved a large space in Japanese filmmaking. Still, Mamoru Oshii’s neo-noir (based on Masamune Shirow’s manga of the same name) remains one of the most famous examples of Japanese cyberpunk. The crime thriller, set in 2029, lands in a world where cybernetic biology is the norm and human minds are tethered to the internet. The film’s sterile cityscape accentuates its haunting depiction of vast cyberspace. Decades after its creation, the technology of the film’s not-so-distant future feels almost within grasp—part of the reason it still connects with a modern audience. And, fittingly, its themes still resonate today: A loss of identity among artificial intelligence and our desensitization to technology both feel prescient decades later. Of the plethora of Japanese cyberpunk films, Ghost in the Shell is more stylish than horrifying, and stands as one of the most timeless of the genre.

Akira (1988)

Akira was heavily inspired by the punk biker film Crazy Thunder Road (1980) from Gakuryū Ishii (of Burst City fame), but the meticulous designs of Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga (and subsequent film adaptation) lends itself to decadent world-building that made it one of the most influential pieces of animated cyberpunk ever put to screen. Though set in Neo-Tokyo, Akira draws from the grief of Japan’s past to cast an allegory of war set in the future. The film takes place 30 years after an atomic bomb, dropped at the hands of the Japanese government, destroys Tokyo. In the face of apocalypse, we witness this world through the eyes of teenagers gliding through disaster on a ride for adventure. Kaneda, the teenage commander of a bike gang, fights evil scientists and secret operatives to expose a sinister government plot, embedding the anti-establishment, counterculture sentiment of cyberpunk film into Akira’s narrative. Jam-packed with punk fervor, the lush saturated colors of the city and its hero’s cherry-red suit paint Akira’s war-torn state with a striking brush.

Sage Dunlap is a journalist based in Austin, TX. She currently contributes to Paste as a movies section intern, covering the latest in film news.