
Liquid Cities: Japanese architecture and science fiction - Thevet
https://placesjournal.org/article/liquid-cities
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Animats
_" 1960s through the 1990s"_

Yes. After the 1989 real estate crash, Japan's economy was way down for
several decades. Japan led in advanced technology in the late 1980s, and then
just seemed to give up. It was so strange. I'd expected Japan to come up with
a way to get out of that mess, but that never happened. Then the population
peaked, and now most areas outside Tokyo and Osaka are slowly dying off.

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bsder
> Japan led in advanced technology in the late 1980s, and then just seemed to
> give up.

I wouldn't necessarily say that--what happened was cellular phones. And cell
phones absolutely ate technology.

The Japanese (especially the teenage girls) took to those like a duck to
water. Japanese phones were _WAY_ ahead of the West for absolutely forever.

The other problem for Japan was _language_. So, exporting culture was
difficult. However, it did happen--"Ghost in the Shell" was 1995 which led to
The Matrix in 1999. Anime probably peaked about 2002-ish and then effectively
just became mainstream.

The US gets a big cultural advantage from the fact that the world has almost
completely defaulted to English as the Lingua Franca.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
> Japanese phones were WAY ahead of the West for absolutely forever.

Not really. Fun fact: In the early 1990s, the largest cellphone brand in Japan
was Finnish company Nokia, and Nokia lost its edge there mostly because you
could only sell phones through operators and the suppliers played dirty: for
example, they refused to sell Nokia color LCD screens.

Now Japanese phones in the late 1990s were indeed the bees knees, but they
were incompatible with the rest of the world (PDC/i-mode instead of
GSM/WAP/GPRS), they missed the boat on 4G as well (NTT FOMA was the first out
the gate, but not standard), and when the iPhone came along it was too late.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome)

~~~
jbay808
Even through the late 2000s, Galapagos phones were way more advanced in terms
of capabilities than anything available in the west, including the first
couple of iPhone generations.

Trouble is, they wouldn't or couldn't sell them anywhere else, and eventually
the rest of the world outpaced them and ate their lunch. Yes, the radio
standards were incompatible... Would it have been so hard to make an
international model? I think they just didn't feel like they needed to.

This pattern keeps happening where Japanese companies develop amazing products
for their domestic market, and then staunchly refuse to bother selling them
elsewhere, allowing global competitors to win in the long term.

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totetsu
"Structural anthropologist Masakuni Kitazawa foresaw a “society adminis­tered
through highly sophisticated mechanisms for forecasting, plan­ning, and
control,” based on “quantitative analysis of data and com­pilation of a set of
optimum conditions for that society’s well-being,” in which a technocratic
“power elite” would gently control all aspects of life, making it difficult to
draw “a clear boundary between service and authoritar­ian control.” " sounds
familiar..

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asiachick
Japan's futurist image is left over from the 80s. Tokyo architecture doesn't
hold a candle to Singapore and many other cities around S.E. Asia. Kuala
Lumpur is full of buildings that surpass anything in Tokyo in terms of looking
out of a Sci-Fi movie.

Cities like Hong Kong and even Hangzhou from the right locations look way more
like "Neo Tokyo" than Tokyo itself has ever looked.

~~~
nmfisher
You’re totally right, but as a complete aside, Tokyo’s architecture still
feels _nice_.

It seems to strike the right balance between density and sunlight, cars and
pedestrians, aesthetics and practicality.

Having relocated to Singapore earlier in the year, I rarely feel “comforted”
by its design - like I could walk around for hours enjoying the ambience of
the streets.

Could also be the oppressive heat and humidity though.

~~~
pezezin
Everyone has a different taste, but for me Japanese architecture is horrid.
Sure, old temples, shrines and castles are beautiful, but other than that...

The tiny streets everywhere, the buildings with only a few centimetres of
separation between them, the cheap plastic look of many buildings...
Everything feels cramped and chaotic.

