Why did all the old cyberpunk writers seem to think Japan was going to take over the world?

not op, but how do you not get it? usually systems with elitism/monopoly become crazy self absorbed, forgetting to compete with others on an international level and promoting their agenda and way of life as the absolute. they dont diversify and they dont question the way things are, they just get stuck in their ways. also lots of lower class smart people dont have as much chances for upward mobility, so most of them leave or live their lives as peasants or anime writers.
it really looked like they were and they had everything. a rising economy, backing from all the UN nations, the US had their back. they just kinda missed the boat on making any real progress. currently india looks like theyll kick ass in another 10-15 years, along with south korea and vietnam. its just a matter of time til russia and the US put china back into economic disaster. china was never intended to be a unified country and historically never was for more than a few decades.

China isn't going anywhere.

lol ok bud

Neither did Japan.

Either India or Germany.
India because of it's huge ass population
Germany because Germany has almost perfect starting conditions for large-scale automatization.

Germany also has a currency that is perfect for exporting.
Good old poor Europeans nations keeping the value artificially low.

Honestly the upper-class in India tend to be some of the smartest people out there. Not sure why that is.

>old
>80s
Feelsbadman
Japan was thee 2nd largest economy and most assumed the economic rise of Asia (correct) would be lead by a capitalistic Japan (incorrect).

It is not that the Indian higher castes are not capable of promoting growth. The thing is that the capital is the strongest in Germany right now. As per they are the most likely to become Europe's first majority automated country (I don't know what's the deal with the immigrants honestly, maybe they need consumers or something).

India itself has talks of "early desindustrialization" going on, but is nowhere as close as Germany to achieving the next phase of capitalist production: large scale capitalism with minimum human participation (even and including finances and other stuff).

In view of that, cyberpunk writers got the right idea about the wrong place; there's still time to write about Neo-Berlin becoming a machine driven dystopia full of migrants fighting around automated factories.

>China has taken over the US in all relevant economic rankings
>still growing a shitload each year
>scientific advances from China are dwarfing all other countries
>invest in US property and industry more than any other country
>buying out American companies each year
>China is now maybe the biggest financial influence on Hollywood now

People have been calling the crash of China for a decade now. You've been proven wrong. It is nowhere near the same situation as Japan.

jesus read a fucking book, its exactly like japan. they just have much larger means of production.

>buying out american companies
this happens to all countries everywhere by everyone it proves nothing
>scientific advances
??? like what nigga robots that jack you off? musk alone is years ahead of anything in china
>biggest influence on Hollywood
yeah deff retarded
also
>implying hollywood is still going to be relevant in the next 10 years.

>jesus read a fucking book
I'd be quite concerned if there's someone on Veeky Forums who doesn't read books.

>they just have much larger means of production.

By definition this makes it extremely different. You're talking about the largest country in terms of population with one of the largest land areas and resources with a tiny island with a stagnant population.

Shit, dude. Did Japan ever start industry and colonization in Africa like China is right now? Do you know how many resources and opportunity China is gaining for itself with this? It's totally fucking different.

Also China was mostly the largest economy and most advanced through the majority of pre-industrial history. It's no fucking surprise they'd reclaim that throne once they caught up.

People seem to forget that if China goes through financial collapse, it will drag the rest if the world with it

Good, it's about time for this world to end.

Then you're in for a shocker buddy.
Elon Musk is a retard.

Fucking this. When was everything made in Japan like China does now? Japan falling only affected the markets. China falling would mean the markets AND manufacturing would cease. Nobody wants this to happen so every other country will do anything to prevent this and China will not crash.

World didn't end in great depression, same situation here- although, a financial collapse today would probably be far more catastrophic than the great depression, considering the interdependence we have today.
There will be major financial collapse, and then war.

Well, take the writing system for one.

In Egypt, hieroglyphs began as simple pictures for use in farm records, then got more and more abstract. Some started to be used in a game-of-charades kind of way, where this animal rhymes with this unrelated word, so can be used as a stand in, etc.

Chinese had a similar evolution. Chinese characters are what happens a a picture of a dog is copied by choppy brush strokes for three thousand years: it no longer looks much like a dog. Other hieroglyphic characters started to be used as rhymes for non-depictable words, or alliterative hints; compound characters were created.

But then look on the peripheries of these bureaucratic scholar cultures, Egypt and China.

The middle east develops vowel-less alphabets, and the Greeks add vowels, and the Romans make their own alphabet from the Greeks, the simplification of written language having plateaued by then.

The Japanese, meanwhile, simplify cursive chinese characters and create their own 72 character syllabary, which is completely phonetic and can be learned in a day or two, just like an alphabet.

However, the elites in China and Egypt never wanted to simplify their incredibly complex and difficult hieroglyphic systems. You learn two or three thousand unique characters, while most peasants are illiterate. You have a complete monopoly on culture, education, law; the peasant has no way to compete with you without a lifetime of education he will never be able to afford. Elitist monopoly. Stagnation ensues - but the elites remain extremely comfortable. They don't care if the peasants have no way to better their minds.

Similar story plays out in Japan. Hiragana, their main phonetic syllabary, is considered childish. In the middle ages, only women wrote in it, while the men wrote in literary Chinese. Hence the phonetic/hieroglyphic mix that makes up modern Japanese.

Japanese high school students can't read adult books. Entire passages are illegible to them because they contain kanji (Chinese characters) they haven't been taught yet, and they are only taught the basic kanji in school. So they read light novels, often with furigana (phonetic characters) in small print next to the rarer kanji (hieroglyphic characters) so that they actually know what sounds they have.

Can you imagine how deep the gulf is between a Japanese high school dropout and a rich, privately tutored boy of the same age? How can you treat someone as an equal when they are almost illiterate compared to you? If you have a low opinion of their ignorance, why would you want to make life easier for them? Elitism, monopoly, stagnation.

>german people at the top
why? what makes them so productive?

I'm not a part of this conversation, but man, I just want to say that I love that people actually bother to type out lengthy, well-thought out posts on Veeky Forums. You won't see this on most other boards, best you get is some jackass quoting one line of what you said and strawmanning you. Because we've gotten to this point where the main goal of Veeky Forums has become "If you type the shorter post, you win."

Interesting to point out that Egyptian art was wilfully stagnated because they worshipped anything old and did not believe creativity was a good thing. The one time we see Egyptian art vary is during the reign of Akhenaten, and we all know how well that went.

Huh, so is this the reason Jap youth are so occupied with manga shit user? Can your average person read Mishima or Soseki? Are they largely/totally written in Kanji?

Even I can read those authors with a little effort. You can do just fine when you know the kanji nips learn in high school. Rare or obsolete words will also have furigana.

korea is the new japan. weebs are getting old.

ww3 is when shit hits with china. only this time its not about a generation coming out of a starving phase but a generation that hates that they cant have a flagship smartphone faster to selfie with.

Forgot to add that these books are written in modern Japanese, which uses kanji and hiragana. I think literary styles which only use kanji have been dead for several hundred years or were the scholarly pastime of an intellectual elite.

The first important work of Chinese literature is about a guy who advocates devoting your life to the study of important works of literature. It had predictable effects.

Most verbs and nouns are represented by kanji, and the in-between stuff is hiragana.

My Japanese is sub-beginner, but I recognise how the writing system works reasonably well.

In this pic, all the kanji have furigana, and the rest is hiragana (phonetic.) On a quick skim, I count 9 kanji in this. I'd guess it's elementary school material.

There's also the English word "door" represented by do-a in katakana, which is the second and less often used syllabary.

Mishima supposedly liked using rare kanji for effect; I'm not fluent enough to say. Any Veeky Forums Japanese person would have a kanji dictionary.

kys

Just kidding, I wanted to join in with that user and commend the long post writer for an informative post.

>When was everything made in Japan like China does now? Japan falling only affected the markets. China falling would mean the markets AND manufacturing would cease.
Are you fucking kidding? The 70s and 80s were FULL of fear about Japan taking over world manufacturing. American electronics companies were falling left and right, Japanese cars were actually becoming good, rock bands were releasing live albums titled Made In Japan.

We forced them to simplify their writing system somewhat during the postwar occupation. From what I understand the plan was to restrict and abolish kanji usage gradually until they could be eliminated entirely, but reform efforts have died out since then and the number of kanji being used is starting to increase again.

Basically

>banks don't give a shit who they lend to
>very relaxed rules for lending, the banks don't give a shit what your financial situation is because "hey the economy is good right now, of course they can pay us back"
>everyone is buying houses because it's ezpz to get money from the bank
>over time the prices of houses skyrocket because people selling their houses know that loans are being given out like candy on halloween
>all property is now expensive as fuck
>a lot of the people that the banks lent money to can't actually afford to make repayments (this could have been avoided with stricter credit checks)
>banks lose a shit ton of money because they've basically given a lot of it away
>since nobody can afford anything anymore the value of property goes from an all time high to a shocking low
>investors panic, stop investing
>less money is being passed around, more people are saving
>the industry suffers because nobody is buying shit
>the value of the yen tanks because the world sees Japan as unstable and drastically reduces the purchasing of their currency

tl;dr Japanese banks giving out too much money to people who shouldn't have been allowed to take out loans. Chaos ensued when the bills started coming in.

Neuromancer was set in Japan

Errbady copied Neuromancer

The end

It's like they have some sort of genetic predisposition toward being 'superior.'

bumping this interesting thread

Indian cyberpunk would be a cool setting.

They were reflecting the common wisdom of the contemporary pop culture, as SF writers tend to do. And, as usual, the common wisdom of pop culture was completely wrong.

nowadays the vast majority of japanese finish high school and learn all the necessary kanji to read newspapers and normal books. high school dropouts are very rare in japan. class differences are not as extreme as in other western countries and most japanese parents value education. rare kanji, i.e. non-standard ones that aren't taught in school, are phonetically transcribed where they appear in novels, so anyone can understand them.
real differences only emerge in academic context where specialized kanji are used that not everyone may know. it can happen that someone who wanted to study a humanities field changes their mind because they're not good at kanji and humanities require the most kanji knowledge.

in general though, kanji are not an impediment to peopl reading books in japan today.

>currently india looks like theyll kick ass in another 10-15 years
India is facing a demographic collapse that will mirror Japan's and have similar effects
>It can be argued that the 'rape crisis' in India is really an 'abortion crisis' - sex-selective abortion resulted in this generation of Indians having a national ratio of 100:94 males:females within a marriage-age generational cohort with some districts as severe as 100:82 (the gender ratio of males:females in a marriage-age generation in OECD nations is 100:101)
The next generation of Indian workers will be fewer in number and the generation after that is going to be a demographic collapse similar to Japan's in the '90;s.
tl;dr - nope

and neuromancer was set in japan because...

first five lines of this sounds exactly like the situation in sweden right now

As a German I don't know if I look forward to that development in my country. We'll have rampant unemployment if mass automatization happens. And then our government will probably institute universal basic income creating a subsidised social class of 1984 proles whose only purpose is to consume.

Really interested myself in how automatization will shake up the world, and its effects on science fiction. For some reason even with all the robots going around scifi never seemed to grasp just how thorough it could be.

>Japanese high school students can't read adult books. Entire passages are illegible to them because they contain kanji (Chinese characters) they haven't been taught yet, and they are only taught the basic kanji in school.

Why lie, you fucking EOP?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jōyō_kanji

An educated adult will probably know about 1,000 more kanji that aren't on that list.

True, the quoted part of your post is still a lie, you shitty EOP.

I'm not the same person. I am an EOP, though. Japanese was too hard for me, I'm afraid.

Why would your government bring in millions of male economic migrants if they planned for the economy to become fully automated any time soon?
It just doesn't add up.

This is true. But the previous elite-peasant relationship remains latent.

The logic of degree of literacy (kanji count) is translated into other fields - test scores, university rankings, class structure, corporate seniority, how important the business you work for is, etc.

Even pachinko parlors and online gaming seem to take on the same mentality as Sinosphere education.

The gulf in literacy between a 15 year old and a 20 year old sets the tone of their adult lives: a society of hierarchies and seniority.

>real differences only emerge in academic context where specialized kanji are used that not everyone may know. it can happen that someone who wanted to study a humanities field changes their mind because they're not good at kanji and humanities require the most kanji knowledge.

Historically, what we would call "humanities" is much more highly valued in Asia than in the more sportsmanlike West. It's very much a display of luxury and social status, like having a kid who can play Mozart.

Speaking of which, Asian-Americans batten on to classical music with exactly the same fervor that Sinosphere Asians batten onto literary education. The old logic remains latent.

Western science began with the alphabet; Western music began with alphabetic notation; Western mathematics began with concepts like A and B and X and Y; Western physics breaks down substances as if they were words composed of letters, instead of unitary elements, the way the Sinosphere perceives its characters.

Let me put it this way: do Western adults use more words than are found in high school textbooks and reading material, you perdamnable homunculus?

>Western mathematics began with concepts like A and B and X and Y
Before anyone corrects me, I know this isn't a literal truth, but you get the general idea.

>perdamnable
Literally what?

Now, imagine if instead of hearing a strange word, what you saw was a character you did not recognise or know how to read out loud.
Would you be so quick to call me on my purple prose bullshit if it meant admitting to partial illiteracy?

China's invested way too much in actual viable and sustainable infrastructure to go anywhere. Not to mention the way they govern without any dissent means even if they fuck up, they'll just say fuck you to any personal liberties afforded and go back to brute forcing corrective policies until things improve.

>admit partial illiteracy
Perdamnable isn't a word.

>EOP
Why is this shitty /jp/ meme on Veeky Forums too?

>viable & sustainable infrastructure

You mean the ghost cities they built in Africa & China that are made of subpar steel & concrete?
Buildings so weak that you can knock through the concrete with a broom handle.

reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/21tt7a/indiansouth_asian_cyberpunk/

Apparently there's a couple.

The future is going to be in Mandarin, not English. That's just simple math.

Per means through or thorough in Latin.
Facere, fectus: to do, done.
Perfectus: thoroughly done, done all the way, completed.
Damnare, damnabilis: to condemn, condemnable.
Perdamnabilis -> Perdamnable: Thoroughly condemnable, worthy of complete rejection.

I think I read it in Ezra Pound. But for analogical purposes, it could be a rare word from a Tang dynasty poem that you were too busy harvesting rice and selling dumplings to learn how to read. My point is the oppressiveness of chinese characters, how they can be hoarded almost like gold.

Yes I understand what you want it to mean but it's not a real word.

>actual viable and sustainable infrastructure
I am currently living in China, the way these people build their shit amaze me to no end. It almost feels like they are living the most Dao way possible, that nothing is supposed to last long enough to see another year anyway, why so serious? And then just beyond a small sea there also lives a people who became the biggest digital camera producer in the world with their impenetrable amount of autism on perfection. Really makes you think.

>building is badly designed and poorly made
>building collapses
Great! Now we can build a new one.
>people die
Bah, we've got plenty more where they came from.

Chinese are crazy.

Who decides what a word is? A scholar or some sullen shithead?

In the West, it's the shithead. But our shitheads, who don't take tradition for an answer, are the ones who conquered the world.

You cannot claim that a word belongs in the English language just because it exists in a single piece of literature.
Stop kidding yourself.

What about our culture allows you to contest that claim? Could a Chinese or Japanese facing an unreadable and unpronounceable character of obviously ancient roots make the same snappy judgement?

Automated production means unprecedented surplus of production. Think about any product you would imagine people still buying in the future. Now multiply that by a factor at least a hundred (thought it might as well be exponential). Germany will probably be one of the first country to officialy endorse the creation of a NEET class with the single purpose of engaging in consumerism to feed the capital. Promoting "diversity" through migration also helps achieve this goal because instead of having to cater to every culture's needs and desires for exportation you can mass produce a homogeneous line of anything you're producing (even more efficiency) and ship it to everyone regardless, because everyone lives in the same state of mind and have the same needs and desires. Crime rates and such are irrelevant to the capital as long as they don't go out of hand, and if they do you can always sell security for extra bucks.

Perhaps we are going to live long enough to see "cyberpunk fiction novels" become only "novels" talking about real scenarios.

I can't believe you're such a fimplefrug.
Like fuck me sideways.

Haha, man, I am going to start calling people fimplefrugs now.

If you see this word everywhere in a few months, this is why.

Frimplefrug isn't derived from anything. It's recognisable gibberish; in fact, it's very conventional gibberish, not mistakeable for anything other than a word that is supposed to mock strange sounds. Could you get any more dioptic?

An unreadable Chinese character, to be recognised as a character, would have to have the typical strokes and stroke shapes of Chinese characters, and for added bamboozlement could have meaningless compound elements. Take these variants of tortoise, for example. Several of them have submerged elements like the characters for sun or middle in them, even though they serve no phonetic or semantic purpose.

t. fimplefrug

I'm not getting into a race to the last word with some sullen phrenulus who is culiplose about being perdamnate.

>he doesnt know that frumple is the huguenotic form of twit

Embarrassing.

Gibson was a weeb

>ywn write the magnus opus of Indian cyberpunk, Poo In The GPU

>ywn write the magnus opus of Indian cyberpunk, Poo In The GPU

No, that's like saying "the now is in hindi". Everyone who matters in China learns English.

Because most of the literature comes at a time of paranoia about Japan's rise and their manufacturing industry. Honda was beginning to overtake Ford and the auto industry was freaking out. Made in Japan was on like everything and we did not have the same fondness of Japan that we do now-- there was less distance from WW2 and we were engaged in several losing wars in the region.

it works. as if they see whats wrong with the world and they decide to win the fucked up game anyway because they can. cheap and fast is what the world wants.

holy shit

it will be snow crash with more poo

>india superpower
yeah, no

I'd love to read an Indian Count Zero, with Hindu deities in the machine rather than voodoo shit.

...and what happened in the us of a?

Some of those are real words, what are you doing bro?

This is gonna be underrated.

To be fair, China's long history does give the idea some precedence. Every few decades or centuries, someone in China goes full retard, there's mass chaos, and millions of people die. We're arguably overdue for another Chinese Happening.

>I don't know what's the deal with the immigrants honestly, maybe they need consumers or something)
isn't it just guilt over Nazism?

>so is this the reason Jap youth are so occupied with manga shit user?
They aren't. Most Japanese don't read anything beyond social media, at all.

Japan was really good in tech and economy and that was the rage in the late 80s

a jap did take over Veeky Forums

Due to misguided liberal humanitarianism and muh evil jewkiller past. It's baffling, really, how autistic people get if you point out that all those "poor refugees" should all be in Turkey or at least Greece right now asking for asylum there.

If I were in charge I'd seriously start mass deportation asap. And I even sympathize with the Syrians.

Typical problems from central banking interest types manipulation. This is exactly the pattern behind every bubble, the home mortgage one in the West was exactly the same.

It's the problem of economic calculation. Ludwig von Mises (Praise be Upon Him) got this right.