In Blade Runner 2049, there was a similar but different scene. When K went to a small shop to ask for help on analyzing the toy horse, and shop owner is obviously speaking some language that is not English, yet K replied in English and they seemed to be able to communicate smoothly. These two scenes seemed similar yet different. In the first Blade Runner movie, they are in an unequal situation, only one side can understand the other side, which, in this case, is only Deckard can understand both Japanese and English. Whereas in the new Blade Runner, although they are speaking different languages, they are able to understand each other.
It may seem to demonstrate how in a Cyberpunk world, all societies are merged together and there are no boundaries between languages. However, that is not the case. In fact, it is completely opposite: it demonstrates how Western culture is still dominating the world and yet thinks that all cultures are having the same standing point.
In Maria Fernandez’s Postcolonial Media Theory\cite{Fernandez_1999}, she mentioned that there is an “utopian universalism” exist in postcolonial media studies about cyberspace, and how “encouraging everyone in the world to enjoy the freedom of cyberspace become a crusade”. Cyberspace seems to be the place where gender, race, and physical disability ceased to matter, we are told. It shows how people believed that cyberspace makes the world a place of freedom, and everyone is connected. However, Fernandez criticized these thoughts. The discussion is clearly not profound because “most theorists are white and middle-classed” and they ignored many different situations in the world that may not seem obvious from their standing point.
Since Cyberpunk originated from our imagination of Cyberspace, a lot of the features in the genre are closely related to it. In the early days of the Internet, everyone were so excited about how “everyone” from all over the world are connected.
Although in imagination, optimists always hoped that Cyberspace is the ultimate utopian where everyone can be free and safe, that does not happen in real life. In the real online world, inequalities always existed. Maybe the Internet does not have physical barriers, but other barriers certainly exist, such as language barrier and digital division.
A proposed solution to this cultural misappropriation problem might be including more Asian actors in the movies.
In the 2017 Ghost in the Shell movie, we finally see many, yet not all, Japanese actors. However, the adapted story line has less Japanese element than the original story. If we take out the characters to look at the plot, there are nothing that has Japanese influence in it. Except for the Japanese actors and geisha scene which appeared at the beginning of the movie, it is hard to tell that the movie happened in Japan. Everything else still looks like any Hollywood movie.
Merely putting more Asian actors does not solve the problem completely if there are no accordingly changes. It would just feel out of place to put someone whose culture and background are completely different from others and the background setting of the whole world.
On the other hand, in the original anime series, there are many Japanese cultural reference, which, I believe, is a better way of incorporating different culture together. For example, in Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG, origami is an important symbol throughout the whole season. Origami has special meaning in Japanese culture, it is believed that when one folds one thousand origami cranes, their wishes will come true. It is the origami crane that reminded Motoko of her childhood memories with Hideo, and the origami cranes appeared again and again in the season.
In this contemporary world, there is no doubt that different cultures and emerging and evolving into new culture. In Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy\cite{Appadurai}, the author defined a simple framework that consist of five dimensions, which including enthoscape and techoscape. Ethnoscape refers to “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live in”, and technoscape refers to the “ever fluid, of technology, and of the fact that technology, [...] now moves high speed across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries.” By looking at these two aspects, we can easily imagine how the world will be like in the future, and thus build the world in science fiction. Cyberpunk is a subgenre under science fiction, and therefore it is based on how we imagine the world is like in the future.
While we are imagining what the future is like in science fiction, we can certainly invent new cultures. Porting existing culture into another society seems to be definitely possible in the future. In the past history, there are many examples of how two completely different culture merges and evolve into a new culture. However, we cannot forget that things happen for a reason. If we ignore the context behind culture and be disrespect to culture, that is not acceptable. When we reduce the deep meaning behind culture in the works, the meaning of the cultural artifact will be reduced to only decorating purpose.
Perhaps the next time, in our imaginative New Los Angeles, instead of just putting up sign boards with different Asian language, we can also explain why those sign board would exist there with Japanese or Korean. Perhaps instead of one character with Asian name but played by a Caucasian actor, we can try to put more cultural reference that makes sense and influence the whole story line by its cultural meaning. Perhaps before blindly fetishizing any Asian cultural object we can understand the history and background story of it.
It is hard for human mind to escape from the cage of where we were born and overcome the cultural barrier, therefore it is hard for anyone to completely understand a different culture or society without growing up within it. I am not saying anyone who wants to use any single element from Japan needs to understand the whole history and everyone single aspect of Japan. We should pay respect to the cultural artifact, and consider not only its appearance but also the background, meaning and history as a whole, not just only take the aspect we are interested in and reduce other parts.
That is to say, not all cultural appropriation is bad. While it is okay to have Californian sushi roll, it is not okay to wear an Indian feather head dress as accessories.
For Cyberpunk, it is even harder to use cultural appropriation in the correct way since the whole genre been doing this since the beginning. Trying to change this phenomenon now maysound impossible. However, if we do not focus on how to remove the cultural artifacts, rather, add more depth in either the background setting or narrative, it would sound more feasible.
For example, we do not have to remove all the neon sign boards with Japanese and Korean, but we could add more depth to it. The protagonist can be someone who grew up in the Chinatown in that city, or there could be stories about how the different Asian cultures survive and evolve in a Western cultural dominant city.
// we can easily imagine future to be multiculture