Once again, I'm seeing violence discourse and since the #AsianCyberpunkJam is going on now so I'm thinking...

Let's talk about Japanese body horror/cyberpunk why I FUCKING LOVE TOKYO GORE POLICE and ultraviolent fiction

CW graphic/bizarre violence

#gamedev #Cyberpunk #rpg 1/

Fair warning: I understand ultraviolence, body horror, and depictions of cruelty are not for everyone and more often than not it's executed rather poorly

Furthermore, even the works gorehounds consider to be the cream of the crop could still be contested on virtue of ethics

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Let's start by taking into consideration that Western Cyberpunk's Asian-inspired aesthetics were born from a fear that Japan would overtake the USA and dominate them, turning their ideal atomic individualism into dystopian monolithic cityscapes defined by ASIAN COLLECTIVISM

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That's why in dystopian universe of #BladeRunner, the cramped cityblocks that tower into a seemingly unending night is marked by literal Orientalist aesthetics

In this shot, the literal face of Japanese culture in the form of the geisha looms ominously over the city

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Also compare the presence of night markets and hawkers in Blade Runner to those in real life

It's something that's associated with "Asia" that can only be found in the Asian parts of town when in the USA - here, the "foreign" has integrated itself into the "homeland"...

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providing a sense of liminality and uneasiness where what is supposed to be SUNNY, WESTERN, and ALL AMERICAN city of Los Angeles is transformed into a hellscape akin to Tokyo at night

Compare the pic of BR's LA on the left with Tokyo irl on the right

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And it's not just restricted to BR as well, searching up Night City from #Cyberpunk2077 gives what is evidently an Asian-inspired cityscape with cramped alleys and wet, dingy floors with mixed-language lettering

So how does this relate to uh... Tokyo Gore Police?

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Flashback to the birth of Modern Japan and the end of the Meiji era where feudal divisions of land were converted to prefectures and an increasingly industrialized Japan brought in Western manufacturing tech and knowhow

Needless to say, things changed

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https://www.japanvisitor.com/japanese-culture/history/westernization

Flashforward to 1989 with the release of Tetsuo: the Iron Man, a weird-as-fuck psychosexual body horror film by Shinya Tsukamoto about two men who become overtaken by a metal virus

Also see, 1988 Cyberpunk classic Akira which also features gnarly as fuck body horror

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In both movies, we see ordinary, poor/middle class characters become corrupted both mentally and physically by enhanced "technology" which has an almost evil/spiritual quality to them

These movies express the anxiety that the pure/natural will be replaced by

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the "unnatural" and "perverted" metal-based technology which in turn corrupts your very soul - and that it's already something that is happening and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future

In an interview, Tsuka speaks about Tetsuo:

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This perversion is embodied in the form of Tetsuo's explicitly phallic and psychosexual imagery, including a literal gigantic drill penis which kills a character in a grisly "climax" (hehehe)

This would not be the last freaky penis we would see in Japanese cinema

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Driving in this last point, the ending of Tetsuo involves the two characters fusing into one phallic and aggressively masculine monstrosity which proceeds to "MUTATE THE WORLD INTO METAL" (exact translation)

This here is what Western cyberpunk needs more of

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Technology then can be seen as an ultraviolence imposed on nature, on our organic human bodies, which in our world translates to capitalistic commodification of human lives and nature as well as pollution and deforestation

Is it really progress if it corrupts us?

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Tetsuo found great success amongst the anti-authoritarian, punk/underground subcultures, notably in the USA - the same subcultures that appreciated the likes of John Waters, Passolini, and other Video Nasty directors, all of which made transgressive films which openly

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mocked and tore apart social norms and conventions of "decency" and "good" which were and are being used to disguise oppressive hegemonies of violence

John Waters, for example, wrote and directed Hairspray about the Civil Rights movement and Passolini, Italian fascism

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This is why Cyberpunk is PUNK! It's about raging in the face of an unfair, oppressive system which devalues and commodifies human life ala both Western and Asian imperialism

This is why Cyberpunk is gritty, brutal, & violent! It reflects real world systems of violence

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sometimes to explore the ways in which the real world is run on violence, other times to provide catharsis in the way of brutally fighting back against these hegemonies

and tbh it's really hard to do right without succumbing the same fetishism you're trying to fight
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So in consideration of all this, what steps can we take to move forward as writers, artists, and designers?

Could the answer lie in... *gasp* TOKYO GORE POLICE?

A film that should serve as a content warning for almost everything under the sun?

Fuck yeah! and here's why...

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*warning: contains spoilers for TGP but tbh I doubt ya'll watch these films for the plot anyway*

Tokyo Gore Police's plot is simple. In the near future, Japan's police force have been privatized as horrifically mutated humans called Engineers terrorize the public

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Fighting back against this threat are the Engineer Hunters, a group of katana wielding SUPERCOPS

The story follows Ruka (pictured), played by Eihi Shiina, the best Engineer Hunter (and only female one) in the division attempting uncover the secret of her father's death

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What ensues is a rampage of near-constant gore and grossness as Ruka fights for her life while pursuing the "Key Man", the creator of the Engineers, as well as other horrible things happening to other people

How does this relate back to what we discussed?

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Well, if anything, I'd say TGP embodies everything that makes "true" #cyberpunk great and salient once you strip it of its neon/orientalist aesthetics

Namely, the horrific interplay between dehumanization and transhumanism in an oppressive system of power

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Going back to my previous mentions of earlier Cyberpunk texts like Tetsuo, Akira, and pretty much every western text from the 1960s-90s

These texts usually treated technology as being a danger to society, that danger being backed up by a foreboding Asian OR Western influence
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Transhumanism, or the going beyond "humanity" into a post-human state, is equated with dehumanization

To deviate from our biological nature and have our own bodies be replaced by artificial or mutated forms is inherently perverse!

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In these hegemonies, bodies that are partly metal, partly scarred, or partly artificial are seen as inhuman or lower - something directly resembling structural ableism

The mutations in TGP reflect that, being grotesque combinations of scarred flesh and machinery

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Specifically, how an Engineer becomes an Engineer is by (1) having a demonic flesh key inserted into your body and (2) getting severely injured or scarred

E.g. if your arm is cut off, you will regrow a new one in its place, but it'll look like a giant razor blade or chainsaw
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Once again, this aspect of transhuman transformation seems dark and evil, considering it's linked to a person's trauma and an invasion into their body by a foreign, demonic substance (the flesh key/tumours come from a hellish dimension or something it's never explained)

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Likewise, the narrative sets it up like this:

Engineer = Posthuman = Inhuman = BAD!

Cops = Human = GOOD!

The Engineers and the devilish Key Man pose a threat to Tokyo and must be stopped!

And in the middle of the movie, this is where things get changed up in a big way...

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The turning point of the movie takes place in a perverted sex club featuring extremely grotesque mutant women being auctioned off (this is the grossest part of the movie so... no examples)

An engineer-hunting cop visits it in secret...

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See here, a person who has dedicated their life to systematically killing off the engineers has secretly been fetishizing them the whole time!

And as a result, the Engineers kill him and turn him into one of them...

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...and sending him on a brief killing spree in a police station

The police chief, enraged, issues a city-wide genocide where the police force shows its true colours, using its authority to kill off (and torture) everyone who is suspected of being an Engineer

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In another scene, Ruka finally meets up with the Key Man who tells her of the reason behind her father's death: he was a cop who stood against the privatization of the police force and was promptly killed off by the Police Chief

Similarly, the Key Man's father was a

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former police sniper who took on the job of assassinating Ruka's father in order to earn enough money to provide for his family

This caused the Key Man to find a way to mutate himself and others to gain enough power to fight back against the force

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Ruka kills him anyway (earlier in the movie, he had forcefully turned her into an Engineer you see), prompting the 3rd Act of the movie where she faces off against the entire police force, embracing her newfound Engineer powers and ripping apart their regime of oppression

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Ruka never chose to be an Engineer, it's true, but her acceptance of it reflects a newer, progressive attitude towards Transhumanism that wasn't in Tetsuo

Namely, that rejecting our preconceptions of what is "human" and learning/adapting/growing is the only solution for us

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The Engineer mutations are, in essence, a new way for the body to process and evolve from trauma - that's why it requires severe injury to occur in order for the mutation to activate

and the mutations only exist because of the systemic violence where authoritarian figures
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attempted to gain more control over the city

Where Tetsuo feared what technology would turn humanity into, TGP acknowledges that the true horror lies in the ways our bodies are dehumanized on virtue of existing in systems of violence than we've come to accept as "normal"

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Mutation/Evolution/or the act of going beyond our preconceptions of what we've assumed to be the norm is therefore necessary for bodies to survive

It's a literal deconstruction of Cyberpunk and the reconstruction of what PUNK really is

and that's pretty fucking punk innit?!
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If you've followed me long enough, you'd know by now I love Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto

Here she challenges traditional notions of feminism by openly declaring a rejection of essentialist binaries like male/female, human/inhuman, and so on

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In the vein of Foucaldian biopolitics, she sees the human body as being inseparable from the systems in which it exists in...

Much like how we ourselves are inseparable from artificial things like glasses, our phones, Twitter, the Internet, game design discourse, etc...

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In that way, we are all Cyborgs and, like Ruka, have been irreversibly turned into Cyborgs against our choice. It's our responsibility now to embrace that liminality and fully accept our transgressive natures to conduct change

That's what #Cyberpunk is really about IMO

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I can see why TGP has not been read as a cyberpunk text before... it's not explicitly cyberpunk and it lacks the AESTHETICS of 2077, BR, Neuromancer...

Which is hilarious to me bc the movie takes place in Tokyo, an actual cyberpunk city...

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BUT I GUESS THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TAKE THE ORIENTALISM OUT OF THE GENRE HUH???!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

*screams*

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So yea, that's why TGP is such an important film to me as a transgression-loving gorehound

Approaching #Cyberpunk in a meaningful way really means going beyond the surface aesthetics and seeing how it could challenge existing systems of power

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To ya'll Marxists and Leftists, it's not a new idea at all

I'm not speaking NEW THINGS, only applying stuff I learnt in Gender Studies to shock horror films

But despite that, I think we can all agree that we need to see more #Cyberpunk texts approach the genre in this way
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ADDENDUM: the movie also addresses Capitalism and its dehumanization of human bodies through commodification, especially in it's Starship Trooper-esque ads where young Japanese girls are encouraged to commit self harm in a TRENDY WAY...

or where public executions are monetized by allowing families of the deceased to murder the perpetrators via a funky Wii-esque control system

It's all to help normalize the everyday violences committed by the state which in turn solidifies their power

Pretty neat huh?

MORE ADDENDUM:

Cyberpunk itself is a result of imperialistic ultraviolences committed by the US on the Japanese and the Japanese on the US and LET'S BE REAL HERE those committed by all imperialist countries on other nations

Why don't we see more of that in stuff like 2077???!!!

SUPER ADDENDUM TIME FUCK YEAH:

Digging in deeper, theres a reason why Japanese Cyberpunk is more BODY HORROR whereas Western Cyberpunk is more COOL NEON POWER FANTASY

and that has a lot to do with USA IMPERIALISM and how they see themselves in relations to the rest of the world