BACK TO THE FUTURE:
Lessons from Japan’s Lost Tomorrowland
In the early 90s, Tokyo was an electrifying, futuristic city — neon billboards, high-rise concrete towers filled with cutting-edge electronics and robots, all connected by whizzing bullet trains. I know this firsthand because I was there. At the age of 17, with a mind wired for novelty and adventure, I dashed through the streets with my school friends, covertly procuring beer from the omnipresent vending machines, and navigating the Shinjuku subway line armed with just one phrase, Sumimasen (‘excuse me!’). I am convinced that this three-week journey during the fall of my senior year, immersed in this living, breathing sci-fi novel, sparked my obsession with Blade Runner (a topic I wrote a college paper on), William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels, and eventually propelled me to become a sci-fi writer, director, and futurist. The future had found me and wouldn’t let go.
Fast forward to May 2023 and I have just returned from a wonderful 10-day trip to Japan. However, what I found was unexpected: Tokyo seemed to have slipped into a time warp. The same neon billboards and concrete towers now stood as relics of a bygone era. It was literally ‘the same’ as I had remembered, but decades of entropy — not progress — had taken place. It was like seeing ‘Tomorrowland’ before its facelift. In a world rapidly embracing automation, Japan appeared to lag behind. For example, don’t lose your JR Rail Shinkansen (bullet train) paper pass — it’s worth hundreds of dollars, and there’s no digital version to replace it if lost (I nearly learned this the hard way). Although, I did manage to place my order at a ramen shop through a touch screen vending machine.
This discovery posed a challenge — I spend a lot of time contemplating the design of the future in a world quickly being challenged by AI and climate emergencies. The one place that, to me, embodied the future in all its Blade Runner glory, had crumbled. To be clear, I loved my trip to Japan; it was incredible on so many fronts (as my effusive Instagram stories revealed), particularly its gardens, its reverence for nature, and the kindness of its people. However, Japan is now grappling with an aging population, economic struggles, falling currency and property values, and declining birth rates. The country seems to have fallen short of its once lofty futuristic vision.
In truth, I had distanced myself from the Blade Runner aesthetic some time ago. Once a symbol of futuristic potential, it started to feel like an overused trope, providing little more than a visually moody warning of giant corporations and perpetual rain. Yet, I had imagined that the futuristic paradise of my teenage years would have evolved to embody a fresh, shiny concept of the future that could inspire me anew.
Or perhaps it had evolved, just not in a gleaming way? As I hurried through the labyrinthine underground subways, domed spaces, and towering connected malls with levels of shops and restaurants unseen from the street level (and lamenting the lack of alfresco eateries and rooftop bars), I realized that I was navigating the infrastructure of a future impacted by climate change. The Japanese have adapted this infrastructure in response to extreme weather: a cold winter, typhoon season in June, and the oppressively humid heat of the summer. The sun is so intense that UV-coated umbrellas and arm shields are worn throughout the year (my neck burn, even in just 65-degree weather, can attest to this). This vast interconnected indoor world isn’t flashy — it’s just necessary.
My new friend, Julian Bleecker, who heads the Near Future Laboratory, designs ‘artifacts from the future’. Unlike the extensive world-building I undertake for a sci-fi script, he and his team take an everyday product, like a cereal box, and envision what it might look like a decade from now. They then fabricate it. The world-building is in the details — the font, the ingredients, the QR-like code, the messaging. Through the construction of this box, a small version of the future becomes tangible. I think it’s brilliant. (Do check out his hands-on Design Fiction kit).
Perhaps the mall — with its map, stores of UV-protective arm shields, and its passages to the mass transit subway system — is akin to an artifact that we need to consider.
As a filmmaker, however, my preferred future artifacts of choice are sci-fi movies. So, on the flight home, I decided to revisit BLADE RUNNER 2049 — Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to my beloved original. I had rushed to the theater when it was released but had been disheartened by the film, feeling a lack of emotional resonance with the story. The existential questions that defined the original Blade Runner (and inspired my college paper), though present in dialogue, seemed absent in heart. On this rewatch, I doubly appreciated the visual stylings of Villeneuve and Cinematographer Roger Deakins, as well as some intriguing story elements like ‘the blackout’ event that wiped out a majority of digital files (note to self: print out your photos and bank statements!). However, it reinforced what I already knew to be true: the iconic image of the future no longer serves us. The dense concrete cities filled with blinding neon and synthetics, a future LA dense with smog and midnight snow (though timely given our recent weather), felt beautifully constructed but… empty. BLADE RUNNER 2049 fell short because it didn’t emotionally connect with the themes that made the original so powerful. What does it mean to be real? Do you need a soul to be alive? Every character in the original (whether human or not) grappled with these dilemmas. In 2049, these concepts were merely part of the dialogue. This disconnect couldn’t be more relevant to our current woes amidst the disruptive forces of AI, where everything we read or see now has a questionable provenance, and we have no clear solutions (though Google’s I/O conference purports watermarks and metadata could help).
And upon my return, I found Hollywood on strike. The writers — the creative core of our famed storytelling machine — have seen their power and compensation eroded by the market forces of streaming. Now, the threat of ‘creative’ AI looms, where ideas are farmed and generated by chatbots, not skilled writers trained in the craft. I only need to look at 2049 to see a potential outcome — technically brilliant visuals devoid of a human heartbeat. Yet, now is the time when we need the human heart, our human ingenuity the most! Writers shape our collective vision of the future, imagining different possibilities for our world. It takes courage to break away from an image of the future that has been ingrained in society for so long. A generative AI only builds from what it has been trained on, not what could be.
We currently navigate a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) world. As we wrestle with the repercusions of climate change and AI disruption, we must imagine a future that isn’t just a projection of our current trajectory, but one that offers novel solutions and adaptations.
My trip made me realize that the future isn’t a static destination, but a process of ongoing adaptation. For better or worse, the future we once envisioned is already here, just unevenly distributed (as William Gibson famously stated). Some elements of our world may seem stuck in the past, while others have taken surprising evolutionary leaps; the old and the new colliding, opening up a spectrum of possibilities. The challenge lies in empowering people, not corporations, to shape these possible futures — guiding their evolution towards a more sustainable, inclusive, and human-centered path, cultivating ‘future artifacts’ that stimulate this essential discussion.
Knowing that ‘the replicant’ will be among us (the AI genie is out of the bottle), what do you envision your future to be?
The power, at least for the moment, remains in your hands.
— — —
Taryn O’Neill is a writer, director, former actor, futurist and avid traveler. She co-founded the STEM and climate action advocacy group Scirens. You can follow her on Twitter for her film, science and tech commentary at @tarynoneill. She is also on instagram.
