Why the Japanese tend not to write great original Sci-fi
Mar 28, 2024 19:29:22 GMT
radiochan likes this
Post by Liquid_Boss on Mar 28, 2024 19:29:22 GMT
A lot of the really great Japanese sci-fi tends to be heavily based on Western sci-fi- whether it's The Thing (John Carpenter's version), The Terminator, Philip K Dick, Asimov, etc. You see this in projects like Psycho-Pass, Bubblegum Crisis, and GitS. Macross heavily treads on Star Trek.
A lot of the lesser seem to basically conflate science and magic, such as Akira and Digital Devil Story. Even Lain does this a bit, by tying together the self and consciousness/will with reality modification. So, with a lot of Japanese-influenced stories, you don't get a lot of the hard-hitting stuff we're used to. Generally, if you look at the best works of all time with deep meaning, it tends to be Western.
I think this largely boils down to central themes. A lot of Western sci-fi has the central theme of looking at what it means to be human. A lot of this originates from the idea of robots in the first place- building a mechanical man and understanding how it's different from you. So, there's a wedge between the natural man and the artificial man, between reality and fabrication, and the inherent values in each.
The Japanese, however, come from a culture focused on animism (at least traditionally), believing all things to be living, also factoring an extension of this as a state of will. There is no artificial person, but just a separate being. So, there is no disparity in fake and real- and should a robot have the will, it could be considered a man as well. There is something to be said about the cultures approaching from perspectives of truth being priority vs order being priority, but that's a whole bag of worms.
Now, some of this is echoed in Asimov and Dick (in particular at the end of the stories), but that division still remains.
I think that animism somewhat undermines the general theme of the genre, which is to examine what a man/reality is, whether it's material or what he/it is capable of naturally.
In the West, if a man shoots robot, he destroys property. If he does so in the East, he's a murderer.
A lot of the lesser seem to basically conflate science and magic, such as Akira and Digital Devil Story. Even Lain does this a bit, by tying together the self and consciousness/will with reality modification. So, with a lot of Japanese-influenced stories, you don't get a lot of the hard-hitting stuff we're used to. Generally, if you look at the best works of all time with deep meaning, it tends to be Western.
I think this largely boils down to central themes. A lot of Western sci-fi has the central theme of looking at what it means to be human. A lot of this originates from the idea of robots in the first place- building a mechanical man and understanding how it's different from you. So, there's a wedge between the natural man and the artificial man, between reality and fabrication, and the inherent values in each.
The Japanese, however, come from a culture focused on animism (at least traditionally), believing all things to be living, also factoring an extension of this as a state of will. There is no artificial person, but just a separate being. So, there is no disparity in fake and real- and should a robot have the will, it could be considered a man as well. There is something to be said about the cultures approaching from perspectives of truth being priority vs order being priority, but that's a whole bag of worms.
Now, some of this is echoed in Asimov and Dick (in particular at the end of the stories), but that division still remains.
I think that animism somewhat undermines the general theme of the genre, which is to examine what a man/reality is, whether it's material or what he/it is capable of naturally.
In the West, if a man shoots robot, he destroys property. If he does so in the East, he's a murderer.