A lot of this feels pretty superficial. I was kind of hoping to see more of an analysis of how Gibson uses foreign words for texture, rather than a simple glossary.
The essay misses one interesting detail: along with the Chatsubo, another restaurant Case visits in the first chapter of Neuromancer is "a teashop called the Jarre de The". Both names mean "pot of tea" -- one in Japanese, the other in French. The juxtaposition is more than coincidence.
Yakuza organizations aren't likely to be "completely independent", even if rival and autonomous: their relationships tie them into a criminal meta-organization, which if pure enough can be seen from outside as "the Yakuza" even if it isn't a federation or a conglomerate.
I've always found it mildly amusing that Gibson picked Chiba, of all places, for his "Night City". In reality it's a rather dull suburban, mostly residential extension of Tokyo (in Japanese, a "bed town") primarily known as the location of Narita Airport, with both criminal organizations and zaibatsu HQs in distinctly short supply.
That said, I'm not quite sure where I'd locate it. Akihabara would have been a shoo-in but that's been taken over by the anime crowd. Kawasaki, perhaps?
Yeah, the first time I went to Tokyo I was excited to see that the train to/from the airport would be passing through Chiba. When we got there I thought: "Huh. Not what I was expecting."
There is a passage in the book with a potential explanation:
“There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins.”
But I've never been able to find a corroborated connection between Chiba and the Yakuza, though the extent of my looking has been nothing more than some desultory google searches.
The yakuza are more active in southern Japan, particularly Kobe and Kyushu, than in Tokyo, although they can certainly still be found in the nightlife districts.
In general, they're also far less powerful than breathless Western reporting (including Gibson's portrayal) tends to make them out to be, in part thanks to a persistent multi-decade police crackdown.
They mostly run construction companies now, an industry where there's been a wild amount of corruption for a long time- in part why most rivers have completely unnecessary concrete banks, ostensibly for "flood control". See "Dogs and Demons" by Alex Kerr (http://alex-kerr.com/html/dogs___demons__english_.html).
Anecdotally, I know someone who owned a house in Okazaki (a city outside of Nagoya). Someone decided they wanted the land for a construction project, so they resorted to threats to get him to move- such as smashing his car windows. No way that was a random punk smashing windows- when I lived in Okazaki, a defaced public bathroom would make the local news. Classic Yakuza tactic, and unfortunately he ended up moving because of it.
That's fascinating, there was certainly no shortage of concrete in the places I visited in Japan. I got to wondering just how much concrete dust must be in the river sediment.
if it is anything to go by (probably not), most Yakuza stories in mangas are about collapsed clans surviving or waning organizations trying to rebuild a mafia rule
I always felt like Gibson was describing Sega City or Odaiba instead of 'enclaves near Chiba' .. Odaiba in particular 'feels' more like what he intended for the neighborhood, and its kind of in the same direction, relative to Ginza and central Tokyo ..
"Chronologically speaking, the moment Gibson shifts emphasis from cyberspace to junkyard was noticed when he paid the first visit to Japan in the winter of 1988. Celebrating the completion of the Cyberspace Trilogy, we had a welcome party for him at an ethnic restaurant called Sunda located just in front of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) in Jinnan, Shibuya ward, Tokyo"
just like he didnt know anything about computers while writing about cyberspace
“I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful."
Gibson can be... flexible with history in interviews. Especially when it's a good PR blurb. E.g. the typewriter story that far outlived reality.
The truth when he says "I didn't know anything about computers" is probably more akin to "I didn't personally use computers. I did conduct deep and comprehensive research on their characteristics and use by others."
When he was blogging for All Tomorrow's Parties, the amount of esoterica and research he apparently read every day was staggering.
The amount of research Gibson did for Neuromancer is really impressive and sometimes shines through in the text. For example, at one point he talks about an "annealing" algorithm. The term "simulated annealing" was first coined in a paper by Kirkpatrick et al. one year before Neuromancer was published. Was he talking to scholars who were reading cutting-edge scientific computing/optimization papers? Or was he familiar with metal annealing and just made the leap himself? Either way, it's impressive.
(I've also heard that the chemistry/pharmacology in Neuromancer also makes sense in a fairly detailed way, but I'm not qualified to assess this personally.)
He was probably reading scientific magazines. Cheap Truth, a zine from back in the days, had a review in #7 telling everyone how valuable they are for science fiction writers. Now sure that is not a fact about Gibson personally, but it's insight into the crew he hang with.
>> non-fiction magazines can help the SF writer and reader escape genre stereotypes and come to grips with the real social and technical issues of the human future. ~~ V.O.
That makes sense to me. Kilpatrick's simulated annealing paper was published in Science in 1983, so he could have run across the term while browsing through issues of Science. (Another theory is that he might have spotted various computer science talks at UBC when he was taking the creative writing course and decided to sit in on some as fodder for his fiction.)
By typewriter story you mean the one from Cyberpunk: The Documentary (1990) (60p) https://youtu.be/UdvxPlhTjDU?t=2619 where he admits to not even touching a computer pre 1988 and using typewriter up to that point?
I think Kawasaki def works as a more proper "city between cities" vibe.
Prob not a weighty opinion, but I would probably look around Osaka, the idea of Nishinari mainly. But in general, the mercantile legacy of Osaka just feels more fitting to paint a "anything for a price" kind of dystopia.
And admittedly, I would say a big part of why I think that is that I think the real correct answer is just Ghost in the Shell's Niihama: Borrow heavily from Hong Kong, except it's in Osaka Bay or Tokushima (not sure exactly which, I always thought it was Osaka, but google has turned up both).
I would wager that he chose it due to the name being simple and "unused". Kawasaki is a motorcycle brand so it would be slightly confusing, Akihabara is quite long and harder to pronounce.
Did Chiba and Akihabara have their respective reputations in the early 1980s, though? It's a little silly to compare the modern state of a city with a 40-year-old projection.
Yes, nothing about Chiba has fundamentally changed since the 1980s.
Akihabara has shifted from electronics to anime/gaming, but that's a fairly natural progression and it's still very geeky/otaku, just in a different way.
Gibson made stuff up as any sf writer does. He never used a computer before writing Neuromancer, and he visited Japan for the first time in 1988, 4 years after first novel release.
San José is still not very interesting now, in terms of urban experience- it can actually be described as “dull suburban“. And its size is mostly attributable to an imperiously expansionist city manager in the 50s and 60s, not only because of tech.
"Ono-Sendai: in the book this is a Japanese corporation that manufactures cyberdecks. In Japanese “Ono” means ax and “Sendai” is the name of a prefecture in Japan."
Ono (斧) is indeed ax in Japanese, but is also a common surname. (The name is written differently, as 小野, no relation to axes.) Being a company name, it sounds more natural to interpret it as a surname rather than a weapon.
Non negligible possibility: the "ax" is also the traditionally identified root for labyrinth - 'labrys' intending the "double-edged axe", and "labyrinth" the "extended, intricate palace under the symbol for power".
This may suggest (were it intentional from Gibson) the "matrix" as a futuristic labyrinth under the same symbol of power. (You - presumably - accessed the labyrinth through a portal with the labrys, and you access the matrix through a portal with the "ono".)
"Sanpaku 三白 literally means “three” 三 “white” 白. It is used to describe eyes positioned in such a way that the iris does not touch the bottom eyelid, showing how the sclera is all connected."
(if you google for 三白 images you will find many examples).
I thought it odd that a language needed a word for something like this (shades of the myth about Eskimos having hundreds of word for snow), so I asked my Calligraphy teacher about this (she is Japanese).
Specifically, I just asked her: I mean, "the fact that someone is looking at you in a way that a slim portion of the white of their eyes is showing either below or over the iris" is something that is often a topic of discussion?
Her answer:
Not really, but in the past, people defined it as a criminal face and didn't really like it.
Nowadays it seems like it's a part of beauty.
They put Audrey Hepburn as an example.
(also, you would probably write 三白眼, - Just 三白 would be, "the snow falls on the first three days of the year" - or a horse with three white legs, like https://images.app.goo.gl/JBU1d9bQaAYmVVfj9 )
There was a book, You Are All Sanpaku by George Ohsawa (that most would have seen after 1983) implying Americans were in an unhealthy condition. Which we are, now more than then. But so are they, if maybe less so.
Having spent some time living the expat life in Japan its amazing how well Gibson captures the feeling of the whole experience, while making up the actual facts. Nothing I have read comes closer than Neuromancer in capturing the feeling of being thrust into an unknown environment and trying to survive on minimal resources.
>It went from being considered as the source of cheap imitation gadgets during the 60s and 70s to the country at the forefront of high quality technology.
I’m not sure this is universally true, but in most contexts I’ve heard while studying Japanese and visiting Japan, サラリマン (sarariman) indicates someone with the kind of lifetime-employment, “I live in town in a coffin hotel during the week and only see my family on the weekends” job that used to be common for white-collar workers.
The identity, uniform, and work ethic are all part of the package. It’s been a while since most big companies in the US could claim that kind of life-long career and mutual loyalty was likely or even desirable, but early IBM might be an apt comparison., down to the dress code, company songbook, and 40-year tenures for senior staff.
The proper notation would be "サラリーマン", with a bar between リ and マ which indicates an elongated sound. In fact, writing it as "サラリマン" actually evokes images of a "caricatured western-POV stereotype of a Japanese stereotype salaryman" due to westerners frequently making this mistake.
It absolutely had entered English vocabulary, if only so far as to refer to Japanese people we were told were obliged to drink at karaoke bars with co-workers every evening.
Probably most Americans' awareness of Japanese words came from a very long James Clavell historical novel amazingly many people read, as was still done back then, called Shōgun.
I recall a very bad movie in which a black gang leader insisted on being called Shōgun, for no apparent reason.
Yes, it was really very bad. But in a good way, and had Vanity in it, 1985. Between it and Buckaroo Banzai (which had its own timely Japanese connections, 1984) I would choose the latter mentioned, but we don't need to choose.
Shogun, the TV miniseries, is pretty good. It features actual Japanese stars like Toshiro Mifune, and spoken Japanese (without subtitles) during much of the show, which was novel at the time.
I think the other commenter referred to an unrelated TV show with a gang leader calling himself "a Shogun".
Did the phrase "salary man" exist before the Japanese phrase? I believe it's kind of a loan word that just happens to be made up of originally English words.
("But "salaryman" is originally a Japanese-invented English word [...] Though "salaryman" is a Japanese-invented English word, it has subsequently spread throughout the West as a way of referring to Japanese white collar workers.")
Though 大辞林 (one of the main dictionaries) does say "salaried man" in its definition, I'm not sure whether that proves that is the etymology (usually 和製英語 are noted differently but given that the term is used outside of Japan now they might just write it in a way that'd be understood even if it's not correct).
There's a funny part at the start of another Gibson novel where the protagonist "wishes he was back in Chiyoda", which is kind of like saying you live in Santa Clara County instead of San Jose. I guess it was harder to do research back then.
I'm not sure I get this. Chiyoda no doubt refers to the ward Chiyoda in central Tokyo, immediately to the east of Shinjuku, so would be similar to someone who used to live in San Francisco saying "I wish I was back in the Tenderloin."
> "Cyberspace ... has actually become a common word used by all of us."
No, no it has not. Various corporate and government flacks, and tone-deaf reporters, have been trying for decades to make it a word we use. But we do not. I have never said it out loud.
It stimulates leisure thoughts about what a "cyberspace" can be.
Directly, it is the sea: the kybernetes traditionally guides a ship.
The direct descendant, recognizable in sound, of kybernan is "govern", and the "space for governing" can be anything, any metaphor from the mind to the house to the world.
In the sense after Norbert Wiener, it is the space where feedback is key to orienting behavior - and, again, it could be everything (and, in satiric terms, nothing).
The name of the software named "Kubernetes" makes sense only as a "governor" for containers.
Cybernetics /may/ be with effort used to indicate "management of agents", because your example seems to use it that way, but it seems unfitting: the image of the "steering man" for 'cybernetics', the "study of feedback based systems", comes from the fact of the heavy feedback that a ship and its controls give to the operator and must be managed to operate effectively - to "direct" a ship, you have to "govern" it (not simply "instruct" it), that is (seems to be) where the sense comes from.
"Cybernetics" clearly deals with all feedback based systems, not just "agents with respect to events and resources" (the latter by the way being more a matter of "economics") like the mentioned software seems to do (and one could wonder how much sophisticated theory is behind it, and how much just centralized management. Kubernetes, the software, does many different things).
(Of course, clearly yours remains a joke as a «study» involves "laws", principles, not implementations.)
It's become common enough that you know what it is without looking it up, which I think is a fine place for it to be, even if it's fallen out of use. World Wide Web, Information Superhighway, and other means of referring to what we just call the internet today are also somewhat esoteric, but you probably understand what they are.
It is a helpful marker for fundamental incomprehension of the topic being exposited, allowing us to skip to some other, possibly more enlightening material.
This reminds of a list I’ve been compiling for the past couple of years: English-language software and products with names taken from Japanese. I find them interesting because there has long been awareness, discussion, and controversy in Japan about the opposite phenomenon—English words used in Japanese.
The following examples all came from HN:
Koi Pond, a load testing tool. Koi (鯉) means “carp.”
Umami, a website analytics tool. Umami (旨味)’s original meaning is “taste, flavor, deliciousness”; it now also refers to a particular basic taste sensation.
Of those, the only one I found surprising was yubikey.
My favorite type of loanword is ones that native speakers don't know is a loanword. Fun fact: the "honcho" from "head honcho" is from 班長, "hancho", squad leader.
I live in Japan, I convinced my Japanese bosses to buy a bunch of yubikeys, I make yubitsume all the time... and even then we didn't realize the connection
Uh, you amputate parts of your little finger [1] all the time? That sounds ... rather horrible and I really do hope there's some usage shift that I'm missing.
One of my favorite parts of Cyberpunk 2077 the game, was the decent amount of Japanese used throughout. I think they really did nail the cyberpunk aesthetic, perhaps with some modernizations within. I appreciate as well that there was a full Japanese dub for a few of the characters including the main character.
The essay misses one interesting detail: along with the Chatsubo, another restaurant Case visits in the first chapter of Neuromancer is "a teashop called the Jarre de The". Both names mean "pot of tea" -- one in Japanese, the other in French. The juxtaposition is more than coincidence.