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OTAKU_CITY

                                                 May 7, 2012

                                                      "Oatku Japan's
Azuma discusses an anime "Saber Marionette J"         Database Animals" (2001)
with a city called Japoness, an imitation of          by Hiroki Azuma
Edo-period Japan, created in the future: a
cavalcade of anarchronisms, a "spectacle of                OTAKU_BASE
ultramodern technology mingled with premodern
everyday customs" (p 22).

                                  Something similar is done in
                                  "Samurai Champloo": It's nominally
                                  set in the Edo period-- the
                                  decline of the era of samurais,
                                  where our heroes are ronin in
                                  trouble with the Shogunate--

But that precise trope, a
city rebuilt elsewhere in the
future: I've seen that a
number of times.

Cowboy Beebop has a city
on Mars that seems like
present-day (well,
circa-1980) New York City.

In one of the follow-up series to Macross
7 ("Macross Dynamite"), there's a city in
space intended to mimic present-day San
Francisco, down to the cable cars on
rice-a-roni hill and the giant inflatable
legs sticking out the upper windows of
Piedmont on Haight Street.




     It would not be difficult to
     go beserk cataloging all of
     the different repeated elements,       And when you were done
     references, and recycled memes         with all that trainspotting,
     that are slotted into the              what would you have?
     "otaku database"
                                                Well, you might be
                                                able to develop a
                                                measure of the
                                                quantum of
                                                creativity, the
                                                tiniest measure of
                                                creativity required
                                                to qualify as
                                                something new.

                                                My contention would be that
                                                the j-quanta is smaller
                                                that the US version.



    Compare to what's been done
    with American SF.
                                             CITIES_IN_FLIGHT
    Somewhere out there, there must
    be a simulacra-city, a case of
    a New-New York, an attempt at doing
    a complete mirror clone, ala,               Poul Anderson's Hoka?
    perhaps, The Instrumentalities
    attempts at a "rediscovery of man"          Star Trek:
                                                Gangland-in-space,
                                                Rome-in-space,
                                                Nazi-Germany-in-space

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