為什麼不少 cyberpunk 小說里都有東方元素？

12-30

請參考William Gibson在2001年發表的一篇文章「The Future Perfect: How did Japan become the favored default setting for so many cyberpunk writers?」（http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1956774,00.html）

Why is it that Japan seems, perpetually, the most inherently futuristic of all nations? When I was a child, the future lived in America, and Japan"s role in that lay in the production of wind-up tin robots and injection-molded plastic spacemen. Forty years later, America"s special relationship with the future has been broken.
………

Japan entered the postwar world as though it were two creatures constrained within the same skin. The sheer cumulative trauma, these ongoing, unimaginable and violent time shifts, had produced a mutant culture. The Japan that emerged in the latter half of the century to out-manufacture, out-market and out-sell the Americans was in large part the inadvertent creation of America.
The Americans, still thinking themselves the victors, had unknowingly generated a cargo cult that knew how to win.

Is it any wonder, then, that we continue to feel that the future somehow resides in Japan? But we have it backward, really: Japan lives in the future; it has lived there for a century. Hot-wired by repeated onslaughts of technologically driven change, temporally dislocated, deeply traditional yet subject to permutation without notice, we all, today, must to some extent feel ourselves to be warped, alien, disfigured.
The Japanese have simply had a head start.

補充一下時代背景：

1979年，哈佛教授傅高義出版了《日本第一：對美國的啟示》，成為風靡全球的暢銷書。

1984年至1988年，William Gibson出版了「賽博朋克三部曲」：《神經浪遊者》、《讀數為零》和《蒙娜麗莎加速器》。

這兩件事的聯繫在於，cyberpunk 崛起的時代也是日本經濟和文化影響力逐漸到達頂峰的年代。作家不可能不受時代氛圍影響，「東方元素」很大程度上是日本軟硬實力的投射。儘管後來日本經濟有所衰落，但其文化影響力更為持久。

乍一看以為有幻想鄉的味道，細細一品才發現不是那麼回事。

九龍城寨需要有一筆

賽博朋克屬於「亞文化」，而「亞文化」的代表又是東亞文化。

主要是日本元素吧....