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Neo Tokyo: dystopian dreams

Architecture, Japan, Movies & TV, Music, Tokyo

While I do despise the YouTube algorithm as a radicalisation & bullshit engine that human society would be better off without, I must grudgingly admit that it does occasionally dig you up a gem.

It suggested this beauty recently after I’d been listening to some of the Blade Runner soundtrack:

I knew I’d heard that haunting vocal somewhere before; took me a while to place it as I hadn’t listened to the album for years, but it was sampled to great effect by Future Sound of London on their track My Kingdom (from the album Dead Cities):

Great tune that.

The original piece is titled Rachel’s Song, written by Vangelis for Blade Runner but unused in the final cinematic release (or any of the multiple director’s cut iterations); in the above video it’s been set to some interesting CGI renderings of Tokyo, prominently featuring Mori Tower in Roppongi (I wonder if it was originally actually some sort of promo video made by Mori).

It got me thinking again (as I discussed here) about how despite not really having any direct connection to the movie, Tokyo is the city which most strongly invokes the visuals of Ridley Scott’s future Los Angeles. And that in turn got me thinking about future visions of Japan itself in various classic animations.

Japanese sci-fi anime has a tradition of imagining some sort of post-apocalyptic Neo Tokyo rebuilt from the ashes following the destruction of the original in a cataclysmic event; here are three of the most influential (all based on popular manga comics).

Surely the ultimate dystopian future Japan is the one depicted in 1988’s Akira. The opening shot of the movie is Tokyo from a high angle, the skyscrapers of Shinjuku suddenly silhouetted by the glare of what appears to be a nuclear explosion (later revealed to be a psychic singularity, and the trigger for WWIII) which rapidly expands to swallow them:

The story proper then starts three decades later in Neo Tokyo, a new city built on reclaimed land filling up Tokyo Bay, a visually stunning hi-tech dystopia of martial law, unaccountable elites, biker gangs, mass unrest & violent protests, and towering skyscrapers built upon decaying foundations of urban grit. Not to mention prematurely aged children with psychic powers, and a bike gang member mutating into something which I still don’t understand no matter how many times I watch it. It’s all a bit of a headfuck to be honest, but an absolute feast for the eyes – one which was, almost unbelievably, entirely hand-drawn. Check out the iconic bike battle scene:

…which leads the ill-fated Tetsuo to his collision with Takashi and subsequent torment:

This collision awakens Tetsuo’s psychic powers, culminating in his rampage through the city and that grotesque final transformation in the under-construction Neo Tokyo Olympic Stadium:

In a neat quirk of fate, Akira is set in 2019 and has Neo Tokyo building a stadium to host the upcoming 2020 Olympics – while of course the real-life 2018 Tokyo is presently building a stadium for the exact same purpose. A notable difference though – the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be the 32nd Games, but the movie’s 2020 Neo Tokyo Olympics are the 30th (the implication being that a couple of Games were missed due to WWIII).

The real Tokyo hasn’t missed the coincidence, and has even been using Akira footage in some of its promo events:

Another influential vision of Neo Tokyo was Tokyo 3 in the trippy anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion; the story goes that the original Tokyo was destroyed by a nuclear strike during the chaos following the ‘Second Impact’, a cataclysmic event in Antarctica causing the entire ice cap to melt and sea levels to rise catastrophically, with the Earth also shifting on its axis leaving Japan stuck in an eternal summer – if you’ve ever experienced summer in Tokyo, you’ll know that isn’t a pleasant prospect! The capital was then shifted to Matsumoto (renamed Tokyo 2), before the construction of Tokyo 3 (in the location of Hakone) as the HQ of the Earth’s defenses against the alien Angels.

This series is actually based on the Apocalypse in the Biblical End of Days sense, with the Antarctica incident heralding a series of attacks by 12 alien entities analogous to the 12 angels of Bible prophecy. And the only people who can stop them are 3 deeply disturbed teenage kids (one of whom is secretly a clone) piloting giant biomechanical Evangelion fighting units (Evas), a nightmarish responsibility which doesn’t exactly help with their existential crises. It’s another total headfuck, and it’s one of my favourite TV series of all time.

But anyway, as for its portrayal of a future Tokyo, it depicts a city capable of going into ‘battle mode’, with all major buildings sliding underground on rollers and defensive screens sliding up everywhere while the Evas do battle with the angels. Not something we’re ever remotely likely to see, of course; but in-between the angel attacks we see the daily life of the characters in a city almost entirely alike the Tokyo suburbs of the 90s, when the anime was made. The kids’ school looks like any Japanese high school, they all live in apartment blocks just like the ones everyone in Japan actually does live in, and they rattle around on trains exactly like the ones rattling around Tokyo on any given day. So while it’s a crazy battle-mode sci-fi city, it’s also just like everyday suburban Tokyo, and there are some great little daily life sequences in the anime & spin-off movies like this:

And the never-ending summer is done well, with the constant soundtrack of cicadas and the characters bitching about the heat as they mop their brows with handkerchiefs. Just like real Tokyo in summer, in other words.

It all gets a bit Godzilla when an angel turns up for a mecha-scrap and they seem to destroy half the city each time, but in the end it turns out the real battles are internal, in the characters’ own heads, leading to another ending that left viewers scratching their own heads in turn.

Here’s the angel Ramiel attacking Tokyo 3 (from one of the spin-off movies):

One more for this post is Ghost in the Shell – not the movie version(s), which use Hong Kong as the setting and which I’ve written about here – but the Stand Alone Complex anime series which is set in a clearly Japanese environment. Specifically, the story takes place in Niihama, a new megacity built on artificial land in the Seto Inland Sea after the destruction of Tokyo in World Wars 3 and 4 (real bunch of optimists, these manga writers).

Much like Evangelion, despite the post-apocalyptic scenario the action takes place in an environment very much recognisable as modern-day Japan, but with far more advanced AI and cybernetic enhancements as routine. It’ll probably prove to be the least wildly inaccurate prediction of the future Japan on this page, but it’s the setting of the Hong Kong-based movie version that leaves the stronger impression.

So there you go, apropos of very little, some waffling musings on depictions of post-apocalyptic visions of the future in dystopian Japanese anime – aka how I just passed the time on the shinkansen from Kyoto to Tokyo!

Check out my posts on Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell. More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more on Japan click here

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For my Japan overland travel guide, click here

Ghost In The Shell: chasing ghosts in Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

Architecture, Hong Kong, Japan, Movies & TV, Music, Taiwan, Tokyo

This week saw the release of Ghost In The Shell, a live action Hollywood remake of the classic (1995) Japanese anime movie (itself based on the original manga by Masamune Shirow). The casting of Scarlet Johansson in the lead role caused some controversy (as her character – a special ops cyborg called ‘the Major’ (Major Mira Killian) – was the (Japanese) Major Motoko Kusanagi in the source material) but I don’t really care to discuss that on a travel blog, and nor is this a movie review or movie comparison; with the film having only just come out I’ll avoid any spoilers and won’t discuss it much more than to say that although I wasn’t too keen on the changes they made to the story, visually speaking it’s stunning and it was great to see some of the original’s most iconic scenes recreated (to good effect) as live action:

But rather than posting about the new version, I’m here to talk about how the original Ghost In The Shell movie was a seminal influence not only in cinema but also on a generation of travellers to Japan, and where to go if you’re visiting Asia and want to get a sense for some real-life GITS-esque locations and cityscapes.

Ghost In The Shell: influence on Western cinema

The original Ghost In The Shell is one of the absolute classic movies of Japanese anime and has had a long-lasting impact on Hollywood, cited as an influence by James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, among others – Spielberg’s Dreamworks is behind the new live action version. It was perhaps most obviously influential on The Matrix (which drew heavily from it), though it’s worth also noting that Ghost In The Shell had in turn drawn on and made allusions to plenty of earlier sci-fi such as Blade Runner.

As well as Hollywood directors, it’s also frequently cited as an influence by movie buffs who visit Japan. I’ve had plenty of gaijin bar conversations in Japan with people who were visiting because of certain movies, and in its tourist-pulling power Ghost In The Shell is probably second only to Scarlet Johansson’s previous Japanese outing Lost in Translation (alongside the peerless Bill Murray in what many consider his career-best performance). The Studio Ghibli catalogue is the other big draw, along with Ghost In The Shell’s fellow dystopian near-future sci-fi anime Akira, still jaw-dropping almost 30 years after its release (and I’d like to see someone try to tackle that for a live-action version!)

Ghost In The Shell: Hong Kong

But here’s the thing… the monolithic Asian metropolis in which Ghost In The Shell takes place isn’t even in Japan… while the story is set in a vaguely defined future Japan(*1), the visual model for the city in the film was actually Hong Kong (albeit a flooded version, making it a city of canals). The neon signs reflected in puddles of rain, the umbrellas shuffling down the sloped side streets, vehicles splashing past… these things can of course be seen, producing a similar atmosphere to the movie (and Blade Runner too, while we’re at it), in Tokyo just as they can in Hong Kong; but if you watch this outstanding mise-en-scène that takes place halfway through the movie, it is unmistakably Hong Kong:

The crowded skyscrapers, the neon and water, the signs and air conditioners hanging out over the narrow roads, the steep alleyways, the blend of English and Chinese lettering and names (we see the name Walter Ma in a boutique window, and I’m no fashion expert but Walter Ma appears to be a genuine Hong Kong designer), and (for those who see the difference) the fact they’re traditional Chinese characters(*2); it’s Hong Kong all the way. A Japanese movie featuring Japanese characters speaking entirely in Japanese, yet set in Hong Kong with Chinese writing everywhere… go figure! Yet, it works… Hong Kong’s atmospheric streets and fairly extreme juxtaposition of the gleamingly new and the shabbily old, the hi-tech and the lo-fi, form the perfect backdrop for the story.

So anyway, if you watched Ghost In The Shell back in the day and it made you think “Holy shit I wanna go to Japan!”, you might want to get yourself to Hong Kong instead of Japan… although really, you should probably get yourself to both of them!

(I should note here that I’m specifically talking about the film version of Ghost In The Shell; there was also a TV series (called Stand Alone Complex) which didn’t use Hong Kong as the location and is more clearly set in Japan)

And then there’s the even more outstanding parade scene from 2004’s Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, surely the best 3-minute sequence in animated cinema, and I’d even say one of the best 3-minute sequences in all cinema. Blending CGI with hand-drawn animation (apparently taking an entire year to complete), it’s set to the same haunting Japanese minyo chanting used in the first film but with the added kick of taiko drums, and I just love that rising bass line as we see the seagulls flocking past dragon-gargoyled skyscrapers; this scene is a real visual and aural masterpiece and alone makes the movie worth watching:

And while I’m on the subject of the music used in these two scenes, have a watch of this 18-minute live performance (it’s absolutely incredible stuff, but if you don’t fancy the full 18 minutes, start it from 8:34):

(I actually once saw a Japanese DJ drop this Ghost In The Shell theme in the middle of a techno set in a Beijing nightclub; it was pretty intense, though no one on the dance floor knew what to make of it!)

Anyway, back to Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence; we’re left to assume that the action in the sequel takes place in the same city as the first film, but while it looks the same in the close-in details the movie lacks any establishing shots which explicitly show it to be Hong Kong, and the parade and temple are clearly of a Hokkien Chinese style. If you’ve been to Taiwan, you should recognise the style of the temple as the majority of Taiwanese are of Hokkien roots(*3) (the language usually referred to as Taiwanese is the Taiwan dialect of Minnan Chinese i.e. Hokkien); this is confirmed in the movie’s DVD commentary by the director, who tells us the team made two trips there to get the inspiration for this scene from Taiwanese temples and a parade – which specific parade isn’t made clear, but it looks a bit like the Keelung Ghost Festival.

So, if you’re a fan of Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, you might also have to add Taiwan to your anime travel wishlist!

Where to Visit in Asia for a Ghost In The Shell Fix

The new version of Ghost In The Shell also takes place in a vaguely defined future Asian metropolis based on Hong Kong (it was partly filmed there), but this time it features an international cast of characters and is filmed (mostly) in English; the Japanese influence is diminished (though a number of key characters are still Japanese) and if the visuals of the new movie blow you away and inspire you to go to Asia (and the visuals are absolutely stunning), then Hong Kong is definitely the place you’re looking for.

If it’s locales reminiscent of the original anime films that you’re searching for, then again Hong Kong is the main location to visit – check out this awesome post on Recreating Ghost in Hong Kong, and also the amazing photography of Andy Yeung; you might also want to visit Taiwan’s temples or a parade like the Keelung Ghost Festival to see the inspiration for the sequel’s parade sequence. Among many options, Taipei’s Longshan Temple, Ciyou Temple, and Bishan Temple are good ones to visit, especially the latter if you like the sound of a mountain hike to get up to it – with some cracking views to reward you at the top.

Roof carvings at Bishan temple — Bishan temple roof detail

Screenshot from Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence

Ciyou temple, Taipei — Ciyou Temple, next to Raohe night market, Taipei

Amazing view over Taipei from Bishan temple — View over Taipei from Bishan temple

But what about Japan? After all, even though visually based on Hong Kong they’re still Japanese movies based on a Japanese story – so where to go if you’re a Ghost In The Shell fan visiting Japan and hoping to catch a whiff of Ghost In The Shell there?

Well, the obvious answer to that is central Tokyo, and more specifically, the area around Shinjuku station with its skyscrapers and neon-decked shopping & entertainment district. West Shinjuku is home to Tokyo’s main skyscraper district, and you can go up a few of them for the city views. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building has observation decks up on the 45th floor of each of its twin towers, the Shinjuku NS Building has a couple of dining floors at the top with great views (though you’ll need to actually go into a restaurant to eat in order to see them) as well as an amazing hollow interior, and the New York Bar on the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt Tokyo (aka the Lost In Translation bar) has outstanding views to go with its outstanding cocktails.

View of the Park Hyatt from the Tocho building — The Park Hyatt from the Metro Government Building

The Metropolitan Government Building is free, but the other two are more interesting. The NS Building is a neat bit of architecture, utterly non-descript on the outside but having a hollow interior with an atrium going right up to the roof and an enormous water clock, and if you go for dinner on the upper floors you get the views thrown in (the restaurants up there aren’t crazy expensive either, unlike in some of the other skyscrapers in town); visiting the Park Hyatt bar means paying an entrance fee in the evening, but it’s free to enter in the afternoon and you just have to pay for your drinks (it’s not a cheap bar though – think in the region of 2,000 yen for a cocktail).

All these buildings are cool to go up, though there’s nothing particularly GITS-esque about them, beyond having somewhat futuristic views of an Asian metropolis. Perhaps better is a wander around the shopping streets and alleyways of East Shinjuku – head there on a rainy day and get yourself a plastic umbrella from the convenience store, and walk around in the neon-lit drizzle while listening to this and you might just capture the feeling you’re looking for. Or alternatively, stick some Vangelis on and pretend you’re in Blade Runner! It works for both:

For a walking tour of Shinjuku taking in the above and more, see my post here (with maps)

Notes

*1 although vaguely defined in the film, things are much more fleshed out in the manga and TV series. Although the two differ, they both have the main centre of the action as the fictional Japanese city of Niihama, built on reclaimed land in the Seto Inland Sea following the complete destruction of the Greater Tokyo area in World Wars 3 & 4

*2 although the film is mostly consistent in using traditional Chinese characters, I do spot a few simplified (i.e. mainland Chinese) characters in the sequence:

This could be a mistake on the part of the animators, or perhaps they actually did see those characters in Hong Kong and so reproduced it on film – but given it was made in 1995, prior to Hong Kong’s return to China, this doesn’t seem all that likely. Or, perhaps, it was even a prescient prediction of the increased future influence of mainland China on Hong Kong

*3 The overseas Chinese communities of Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines are also mostly Hokkien, with significant Hokkien influence in Singapore & Malaysia too, so if you’ve visited the Chinese temples in Bangkok’s Chinatown, or elsewhere in Southeast Asia, you’ll likely have seen a similar style there

Any questions or comments? Give me a shout below!

More Tokyo posts here, and check out my quick guide to Tokyo; for more posts on Japan click here

For more Taipei posts, click here

Also check out my overland travel guides to Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan

(This page contains affiliate links i.e. if you follow the links from this page to the movies on Amazon and make a purchase, 4corners7seas will receive a commission from Amazon. This commission comes out of Amazon’s profit margin at no extra cost to you. Thank you in advance should you choose to do so, and all above-mentioned movies are awesome and money well spent!)

Robert Plant’s Lemon Juice: surviving the Trans-Sumatra Highway (Sumatra to Java overland)

Indonesia, Music, Overland travel, Travel tales

Sumatra to Java overland: view of Gunung Kerinci (Mt Kerinci), Sumatra — A view of Gunung Kerinci (Mt Kerinci) across the tea plantations, West Sumatra: the best thing about my journey to Jakarta!

I flopped into a chair and ordered a plate of nasi goreng and a bottle of Bintang, now running on empty and entirely on autopilot. The nasi goreng was to satiate my hunger, the beer to celebrate my having survived the Trans-Sumatra Highway; it was hot and humid even in the small hours, and as I sipped the deliciously cold beer my faraway eyes were drawn to the TV screen, a DVD of live concert footage of Led Zeppelin in the 1970s (I think it was this one), Robert Plant exhorting me to squeeze his lemon, to squeeze it until his juice ran down his leg…

It was my second visit to Sumatra, but now I was making my way to other parts of Indonesia for the first time and I’d just spent some 36 hours or so travelling from Sumatra to Java overland, from Sungai Penuh in Sumatra’s Kerinci Seblat National Park, mostly on a banged-out old clapper of a bus flagged down on the Trans-Sumatra Highway (following a long initial minivan ride to the highway!) – and that was after the previous day’s 10-hour journey from Bukittinggi to Sungai Penuh (with a change of minivans in Padang). Exhausting stuff by its very nature, but made even more so when you’re fearing for your life the entire time! Finally arriving in Jakarta at 2 in the morning, I dumped my shit in a cheap hotel and stumbled down the road like a weary seadog finally back on dry land, or maybe more like a good old-fashioned zombie. A hungry zombie, looking for some quick food before finally collapsing into bed.

The National monument in Jakarta — Jakarta

The first day’s minivans from Bukittinggi to Sungai Penuh had been reasonably pleasant (bar a lot of faffing around changing vans in the city of Padang), with some cracking scenery including views in Kerinci Seblat park of Gunung Kerinci (Mt Kerinci, Sumatra’s highest) and the tea plantations surrounding it (I detoured off the Trans-Sumatra Highway in order to visit the park, but really it needed a longer stay to be worth it). But seriously, that highway bus ride down to Jakarta on days 2 & 3 was absolutely ridiculous. There was only one driver, one driver the whole way from Bangko (at least, I think that’s where I switched to the highway bus) to Jakarta, and I think the bus had actually originated in Padang (or perhaps even further north than that), and I think he’d been the only driver from there too, meaning that same one guy drove, singlehanded, for at least 30-something hours with just three 90-minute meal breaks per day – breaks during which I observed him nailing a plate of food and then power-napping for an hour, running to the prayer room to quickly pray (for our survival?), and then calling everyone to board again.

Jakarta's skyline as seen from the National Monument — The Jakarta skyline

As if that wasn’t mental enough, the Trans-Sumatra Highway is a real mountain roller coaster in places and our man had a penchant for overtaking logging trucks on blind corners, pulling back in just in time to avoid a head on smash by a whisker – but not before I’d soiled my pants (again).

How he achieved this feat of endurance without killing us all, I will never understand. The one enjoyable bit of this Sumatra to Java overland slog was the ferry crossing, when I passed out for a couple of blissful hours in one of the deck chairs out on deck under the stars, the only useful sleep I could snatch on that terrifying journey.

A group of Indonesian tourists I chatted to in Jakarta — A group of Indonesian lads (tourists from Sulawesi) who stopped for a chat in Jakarta

So there I finally was in this cheap restaurant in Jakarta, a decent plate of food before me, a decent beer in my hand, deliriously tired but alive; I devoured my nasi goreng in short order and all I wanted was to go to bed… and yet I was utterly transfixed by the TV screen, rooted to my seat. Led Zeppelin cast a spell on me from four decades in the past, and I was mesmerised. Somehow, I’d never really seen or heard any of their live recordings before, never appreciated how god damn fucking tight they were, with how much heart and soul they played the blues:

…or how seriously fucking incredible Bonham’s drumming really was:

…but what the fuck was Plant on about with all the lemons, anyway? Actually, it’s a lyric borrowed from the one and only Robert Johnson, one which Plant loved to use:

Seems strange to say it now, especially as I was and am so into both heavy rock and the blues; but for some reason, Led Zeppelin had never really blown me away before. I guess I’d never listened to their stuff closely enough, perhaps due to the familiarity one automatically has with their more famous (and, Stairway aside, imo generally less interesting) numbers.

Well, they blew me away that night and I finally saw the error of my ways. I sat through the whole DVD, knocking back a few more Bintangs, and eventually staggered to bed at perhaps 4am. I then proceeded to sleep all day, only stirring in the evening when hunger roused me to head out into Jakarta’s bedlam. And over the following days and weeks I worked my way through Led Zeppelin’s back catalogue, devouring it as I’d devoured that nasi goreng.

Thinking about it, I suppose I would always have eventually realised how awesome Led Zeppelin were; their brilliance would have demanded it. But we often attach certain songs, albums, and bands to episodes and periods in our lives (and I personally find this to be especially true during periods of travel), and I love the way that now, thanks to the way I really got into Led Zeppelin for the first time, whenever I hear Robert Plant singing about his lemon juice it transports me back to a 3am plate of nasi goreng in Jakarta, back to that feeling of exhausted relief at having survived the Trans-Sumatra Highway in between seeing the many wonders of Sumatra and Java.

Any thoughts or questions on either Led Zeppelin or the Trans-Sumatra Highway? Leave a comment below!

For more Indonesia posts, click here

Also see my Indonesia overland travel guide

(This page contains an affiliate link i.e. if you follow the link from this page to the DVD on Amazon and make a purchase, 4corners7seas will receive a commission from Amazon. This commission comes out of Amazon’s profit margin at no extra cost to you. Thank you in advance should you choose to do so, and the DVD is money well spent!)