Isn’t this also partly why you saw so much action schlock and cyberpunk-y stuff in the 80s and 90s cast Japanese businessmen and Yakuza as villains?
I think less so with that stuff, tbh. Like most entertainment under capitalism, cyberpunk took an original, groundbreaking work, Gibson’s Neuromancer, and repackaged it to maximize profit. Neuromancer is set in Japan, Chiba City, on Tokyo Bay, so the clones and copycats were trying to mimic that aesthetic. Obviously all art, even bad art, is somewhat a reflection of the society in which it’s produced, so yeah, that anti-Japanese sentiment is there, but I think it’s less a function of intentional propaganda and more trying to make a cheap buck.
I think it was in the air already, even before Gibson. Bladerunner came out in 1982, two years before Neuromancer. Gibson was writing Neuromancer at the time and was stunned the movie had such a similar vibe to the book he hadn’t finished yet.
Bladerunner is definitely expressing an anti-Japanese sentiment by conflating general social decay with an increase in Asian people and culture in Los Angeles.
