Thread by @Kavaeric

A fascinating thread, and as a fellow Japanese person it's interesting to see how Yellow Peril manifests itself in the worst way possible as the genre gets more co-opted by western corporate powers

https://twitter.com/wouldhaus/status/1338419857541328896?s=20

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Yellow Peril refers to the racism and phobia of East Asia, which was characteristic of western countries in the 20th century (ironically, since this was also the age of Orientalism and Japonisme)

While Yellow Peril can and does refer to anti-Asian immigration laws and then internment during WWII, it does extend out to very uncomfortably recent times...

In the 1950s and 60s Japan began to ramp up its industrial design sector. Companies like Sony, National, Nippon-Colombia, Nikon, and others began to shed their reputation of producing electronic junk (similar to the stigma we have against "Made In China" nowadays)

Part of this was an aggressive front to penetrate the American consumer market, which at that point, the world was still dominated by American manufacturing. You can see in the last picture how the Sony radio was modelled after the styling of an American car.

At the same time many European countries such as the United Kingdom were starting to let go of their colonial holdings. A fear began: Japan was now accelerating its production and innovation at a breakneck pace, whereas Western countries were starting to fall behind.

By the 1980s, one could say that these fears became a reality. Japan now manufactured the majority of the world's electronics. Japanese-based media, anime and music, were becoming popular with youth. Chevrolet and Chrysler were being replaced by the likes of Toyota and Honda.

While the US was still reeling from the energy crises, the Japanese economy showed no signs of stopping. Nothing seemed to stop them, and western companies, especially in the realm of tech, were struggling or outright failing to keep up with their Japanese counterparts.

We would of course know that the bubble economy popped and crashed hard right at the start of 1990, a economic stagnation that Japan battles to this day, but for our purposes and for someone living in say, 1982, Japan was headed to become a new global superpower.

So if you were an American from 1982 watching Japanese corporations and culture slowly eat up everything around you, what would your dystopia look like?

Well, your dystopia probably looks like giant corporate conglomerates, but more importantly, Japanese corporate conglomerates. Neon signs in Japanese kanji. Billboards showcasing East Asian women, not white women, as the standard of beauty.

Bloody hell, our main character, who is white, isn't using a fork! He's using chopsticks!

The association with East Asian aesthetics and 1980s cyberpunk isn't a coincidence - it was a very real reaction to a fear of perceived neo-colonialism on part of Japan. Ironic, as America had been rampantly exporting its culture for the decades prior, but nevertheless very real.

Alarmingly, this sort of Yellow Peril Dystopianism continues to this day. A prominent example I see rarely brought up is Mirror's Edge is itself set in a dystopian surveillance state. Its built environment is largely in English, but things like crates and signs in hallways

were, for some reason, bilingual in both English and Chinese.

In 2008, when Mirror's Edge was released, Japan wasn't the economic powerhouse it was, but China was already visibly on its road there, which makes the game's use of Chinese in its environment that much more loaded.

As a sort of continuation of yesterday's diatribe I do find it very fascinating, if a little scary as a Japanese/Chinese person myself, to watch how CP 2077, a game released in the year of our lord 2020, continues to unquestionably and uncritically uphold these tropes.

California is a state with a rich Asian history (and not just that of the Chinese and Japanese!), and seeing CP77 continue to treat East Asians as some kind of invasive force in its environment and characters is, well, ridiculous, to put it mildly.

It's not just that Asian aesthetics exist in the game, but also how it's framed in such an easily otherising manner: you either speak normally or you speak Asian (or some other racial stereotype). The characters are either normal or they're Asian (or something "else").

Hell, you can design V's face to be robot fucking Fu Manchu, "Asian" in every likeness, but they'll still be treated as white. Because you're white and normal, unlike those Asians roaming Night City.

Blade Runner's inclusion of Asian aesthetics in a setting where all heroic figures and "the common man" are white is done to depict the influence Asian culture as a parasitic, invasive force taking over white America/California; CP77 does it all the same.

As @vexwerewolf puts it, shittiness tends to be connected to other shittiness. CDPR's transphobia and general hate of both game developers and gamers wanting a finished product of course would not be complete without a bit of uncritical racism in the mix.

https://twitter.com/vexwerewolf/status/1338535400197984261

As with most of my threads, there's a whole load of other things I could talk about: the paradox of "cheap Asian labour" vs "rich Asians coming to take everything", how this new breed of orientalism now accounts for sinophobia too, and how it's connected to the pandemic...

But I think based on what I've written here I hope my supposed friends and followers of my scifi work can understand don't have warm feelings towards CP, or how I really don't care for them when their cis - and white - selves insist on playing the game with an uncritical eye.

If this is what you call "ruining your fun", wait till you hear what life has been like for the past year or so.

Further reading: @Yinyangfooey wrote for @WIRED about Cyberpunk 2077's orientalism and its place in larger the larger cyberpunk trope.

He's actually, yknow, a writer who knows how to make the words sound good, so give his article a read.

wired.com/story/oriental…

@Yinyangfooey Yeah, he knows how to make the words sound gooder than I can.

More addendums:

Racism towards East Asians is a particularly difficult topic because of how different it manifests itself from Black/Native discrimination, but also because white society has done a very good job at obscuring said racism.

https://twitter.com/Crazy_Procyon/status/1338560020015804416

The whole fiasco with that school board lumping "Asians" with "whites" and separate from "POC" from a few weeks back sort of says it all, and it's a way to discredit Asian struggles and also divide and conquer POC that works out to be shockingly effective.

It's something of a very insidious but highly useful method of boxing us in: on the white side, we're told we're exceptional and are model ethnic groups, but those standards they hold us to are exceedingly white; stepping out of line results in punishment.

A Black peer of mine once referred to Asian-white dynamics as "an abusive racial relationship", whereby we're held to their standards and expected to fall in line, while also forcing us to allow them to co-opt our culture, racial in-jokes, and mannerisms openly.

Further to that, this buddy-buddy nature is then weaponised to force a sort of "POC wedge" between us and other ethnic groups: you're not like /those/ Black and Native and Latinx people who are super ethnic, you're like /us/, virtuous white people who act in civilised ways.

This wedge means that other POC groups start to distrust East Asians, and vice versa. Asians are stuck between white people who get to puppet our measure of success and still hold power on who gets to be "good Asians", and other POC buy in and view us as effectively white.

Further reading: A previous thread I did regarding Japanese/East Asian cultural appropriation

https://twitter.com/Kavaeric/status/1330194962613465089

This twitter thread has spread far enough to reach people who will automatically assume I'm American so I think it's time to mute