My Own Private Tokyo

By William Gibson

I wish I had a thousand-yen note for every journalist who, over the
past decade, has asked me whether Japan is still as futurologically
sexy as it seemed to be in the '80s. If I did, I'd take one of these
spotlessly lace-upholstered taxis over to the Ginza and buy my wife a
small box of the most expensive Belgian chocolates in the universe.
I'm back to Tokyo tonight to refresh my sense of place, check out the
post-Bubble city, professionally resharpen that handy Japanese edge.
If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially
technology-driven, you pay attention to Japan. There are reasons for
that, and they run deep.
Dining late, in a plastic-draped gypsy noodle stall in Shinjuku, the
classic cliche better-than-Blade Runner Tokyo street set, I scope my
neighbor's phone as he checks his text messages. Wafer-thin, Kandy
Kolor pearlescent white, complexly curvilinear, totally ephemeral
looking, its screen seethes with a miniature version of Shinjuku's
neon light show. He's got the rosary-like anticancer charm attached;
most people here do, believing it deflects microwaves, grounding them
away from the brain. It looks great, in terms of a novelist's need for
props, but it may not actually be that next-generation in terms of
what I'm used to back home.
Tokyo has been my handiest prop shop for as long as I've been writing:
sheer eye candy. You can see more chronological strata of futuristic
design in a Tokyo streetscape than anywhere else in the world. Like
successive layers of Tomorrowlands, older ones showing through when
the newer ones start to peel.
The world's second-richest economy, after a decade of stagflation,
still looks like the world's richest place, but the global lea lines
of money and hustle have invisibly realigned. It feels to me as though
all that crazy momentum has finally arrived.
So the pearlescent phone with the cancer thingy gets drafted straight
into props, but what about Japan itself? The Bubble's gone, successive
economic plans sputter and wobble to the same halt, one political
scandal follows another ... Is that the future?
Yes. Part of it, and not necessarily ours, but definitely yes. The
Japanese love "futuristic" things precisely because they've been
living in the future for such a very long time now. History, that
other form of speculative fiction, explains why.
The Japanese, you see, have been repeatedly drop-kicked, ever further
down the timeline, by serial national traumata of quite unthinkable
weirdness, by 150 years of deep, almost constant, change. The 20th
century, for Japan, was like a ride on a rocket sled, with successive
bundles of fuel igniting spontaneously, one after another.
They have had one strange ride, the Japanese, and we tend to forget
that.
In 1854, with Commodore Perry's second landing, gunboat diplomacy
ended 200 years of self-imposed isolation, a deliberate stretching out
of the feudal dreamtime. The Japanese knew that America, not to be
denied, had come knocking with the future in its hip pocket. This was
the quintessential cargo-cult moment for Japan: the arrival of alien
tech.
The people who ran Japan - the emperor, the lords and ladies of his
court, the nobles, and the very wealthy - were entranced. It must have
seemed as though these visitors emerged from some rip in the fabric of
reality. Imagine the Roswell Incident as a trade mission, a successful
one; imagine us buying all the Gray technology we could afford, no
reverse engineering required. This was a cargo cult where the cargo
actually did what it claimed to do.
They must all have gone briefly but thoroughly mad, then pulled it
together somehow and plunged on. The Industrial Revolution came whole,
in kit form: steamships, railroads, telegraphy, factories, Western
medicine, the division of labor - not to mention a mechanized military
and the political will to use it. Then those Americans returned to
whack Asia's first industrial society with the light of a thousand
suns - twice, and very hard - and thus the War ended.
At which point the aliens arrived in force, this time with briefcases
and plans, bent on a cultural retrofit from the scorched earth up.
Certain central aspects of the feudal-industrial core were left
intact, while other areas of the nation's political and business
culture were heavily grafted with American tissue, resulting in hybrid
forms ...
Here in my Akasaka hotel, I can't sleep. I get dressed and walk to
Roppongi, through a not-unpleasantly humid night in the shadows of an
exhaust-stained multilevel expressway that feels like the oldest thing
in town.
Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I'm
waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She's probably
Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very
expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for
some black outer layer - equally sheer, skintight, and microshort -
and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea.
She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone
in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly
jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the
opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone
swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross,
and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul
Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision.
There's a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie
origami.
This ghost of the Bubble, this reminder of Tokyo from when it was the
lodestar for every hustler on the face of the planet, strolls on and
then ducks into a doorway near the Sugar Heel Bondage Bar. I last came
here right on the cusp of that era, just before the downturn, when her
kind were legion. She's old-school, this girl: fin de siecle Tokyo
decadence. A nostalgia piece.
The Bubble, I think, walking back to the hotel with a box of sushi
from a high-end liquor store and a bottle of Bikkle, that was their
next-to-last kick. That transplanted postwar American industrial
tissue took awhile, and in the '80s it finally did the trick, but the
economic jet fuel couldn't be sustained.
The world's second-richest economy, after nearly a decade of
stagflation (the century's final kick), still looks like the world's
richest place, but energies have shifted, global lea lines of money
and hustle have invisibly realigned, yet it feels to me as though all
that crazy momentum has finally arrived. Somewhere. Here. Under the
expressway Andrei Tarkovsky used for a sci-fi set when he shot
Solaris.
Next day, I run into fellow Vancouverite Douglas Coupland in the
Shibuya branch of Tokyu Hands, an eight-floor DIY emporium where doing
it yourself includes things like serious diamond cutting. He
introduces me to Michael Stipe. Coupland is as jet-lagged as I am, but
Stipe indicates that he's actually club-lagged, having stayed up till
2 in the morning the night before. And how does he like Tokyo? "It
rocks," says Stipe.
Later, having headed for Harajuku and Kiddy Land, another eight floors
- these devoted to toys that definitely aren't us - I find myself
distracted outside Harajuku Station by a bevy of teenage manga nurses,
rocker girls kitted out in knee-high black platform boots, black
jodhpurs, black Lara Croft tops, and open, carefully starched lab
coats, stethoscopes around their necks.
The look clearly isn't happening without a stethoscope.
They're doing the Harajuku hang - smoking cigarettes, talking on their
little phones, and being seen. I circle them for a while, hoping one
will have a colostomy bag or a Texas catheter worked into her outfit,
but the look, like most looks here or anywhere, is rigidly delineated.
They all have the same black lipstick, worn away to pink at the
center.
I think about the nurses on my way back to the hotel. Something about
dreams, about the interface between the private and the consensual.
You can do that here, in Tokyo: be a teenage girl on the street in a
bondage-nurse outfit. You can dream in public. And the reason you can
do it is that this is one of the safest cities in the world, and a
special zone, Harajuku, has already been set aside for you. That was
true during the Bubble, and remains true today, in the face of drugs
and slackers and a notable local increase in globalization. The
Japanese, in the course of being booted down the timeline, have
learned to keep it together in ways that we're only just starting to
imagine. They don't really worry, not the way we do. The manga nurses
don't threaten anything; there's a place for them, and for whatever
replaces them.
I spend my last night in Shinjuku with Coupland and a friend. It's
hard to beat, these nameless neon streets swarming with every known
form of electronic advertising, under a misting rain that softens the
commercials playing on facade screens of quite surreal width and
clarity. The Japanese know this about television: Make it big enough
and anything looks cool.
Those French Situationists, going on about the Society of the
Spectacle, they didn't have a clue. This is it, right here, and I love
it. Shinjuku at night is one of the most deliriously beautiful places
in the world, and somehow the silliest of all beautiful places - and
the combination is sheer delight.
And tonight, watching the Japanese do what they do here, amid all this
electric kitsch, all this randomly overlapped media, this chaotically
stable neon storm of marketing hoopla, I've got my answer: Japan is
still the future, and if the vertigo is gone, it really only means
that they've made it out the far end of that tunnel of prematurely
accelerated change. Here, in the first city to have this firmly and
this comfortably arrived in this new century - the most truly
contemporary city on earth - the center is holding.
In a world of technologically driven exponential change, the Japanese
have an acquired edge: They know how to live with it. Nobody
legislates that kind of change into being, it just comes, and keeps
coming, and the Japanese have been experiencing it for more than a
hundred years.
I see them poised here tonight, hanging out, life going on, in the
glow of these very big televisions. Postgraduates at all of this.
Home at last, in the 21st century.
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William Gibson wrote about digital cinema in Wired 7.10. His seventh
novel, Pattern Recognition, will be published by Putnam next spring. Copyright (C) 1993-99 The Conde Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.