These are all great... but I want to know what the Japanese aesthetic is for totally over-the-top neon city streets and arcade designs. I love that real-life cyberpunk stuff just as much as the more traditional stuff.
My theory is that it has much to do with a culture that grows up expressing ideas pictorially. During my (admittedly short .. just 1yr) time in Japan, I noticed that people don't just write in Kanji, they think in Kanji. They pun in Kanji - one way to pun in Japanese is to use a word that can resolve to alternative Kanji combinations whose combined meanings are funny in context. If they're fishing for an idea or brainstorming, they start drawing Kanji in the air with their fingertips.
And to me the cultural effect of this pervasive visual thinking nearly-since-birth is cool aesthetics. For example, the average "How-to" book in a Japanese book store is chock-full of diagrams and flow charts, with various sections outlined in garish colors like blue and orange, and different fonts for each different type of idea. (Also notice that China, whose characters Japan shares, has very cool aesthetics of its own. Both countries have beautiful landscapes, which probably contributes something as well).
Also, anyone who goes to Japan notices, that they go for totally-over-the-top-ness (for example, the Tokyo reggae subculture is populated by people with really huge dreadlocks).
So combining heavy orientation towards visual stimuli and color, a love of over-the-top-ness, and a healthy dose of anime with its romantic-teen-angst-cool, you get that awesome cyberpunk stuff. But I think it's not easy to characterize analytically as the Zen aesthetics, where the visual form is meant to represent a well-defined state of mind and personal character.
Also, anyone who goes to Japan notices, that they go for totally-over-the-top-ness
Strike Japan, replace with "America", and every last one of my coworkers would agree with this statement.
Here's the man on the street view: "When Americans build a car, you see, they don't think of putting it down a tiny little street into a big driveway. They think it is a covered wagon, travelling out west like you see in the cowboy movies. So they make it HUGE. And then you go to their cities and do they make little rinky dinky 10 story office buildings? No -- they make GIANT HUNDRED FLOOR office buildings. They're also culturally predisposed to liking swagger, because of the cowboys. That is why John Wayne and George Bush are so popular."
Yeah, I used a bad example. It's not really over-the-topness in terms of size or expense, like in the U.S. (where it's really an obsession with number-one-ness).
Have you ever seen the "Human Tetris" video? It's a Japanese gameshow. You might think that it's just one gameshow, but no ... all the gameshows have crazy-haired announcers who yell wild-eyed the whole time. I mean that kind of over-the-top-ness .. to me it's quite different :)
Yes, but an honest question from a non-American: Isn't that much/more/most/greater/grander of "everything" rather than over-the-top?
Over-the-top, to me, implies a taking something to-the-extreme-and-then-some, and it's in this latter phase of and-then-some where the essence of over-the-top-ness is happening, because it requires something new to happen. Making a building just more tall isn't any "new" it's "only" much/more/most/greater/grander of the thing that's already there.
Not that scyscrapers aren't impressive or anything and they are new in the sense that such thing haven't always been around.
To me, Pulp fiction has something of over-the-top-ness, but Rambo never had.
This is a good point, and it's also often reflected in Japanese websites. I think it has something to do with (oddly) a Japanese distrust of sparse information. In the US, my websites were always very simple with little ornamentation. Those sites never succeeded in Japan because if there is not an abundance of text and (ideally) graphics, it just looks like nothing is really happening.
It's one of the first book I've read about zen (the first was '101 Zen Stories', which I recommend as well). Didn't know it was a classic when I bought it fifteen years ago. I've reread it many, many times.
Edit: I forgot 'Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness' by the same author.
I haven't actually gotten to it yet, but Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren has been on my to-read list for quite a while.
Yugen - Profundity or suggestion rather than revelation.
Whenever I try this in conversation with most fellow Americans, they assume I'm just muddle-headed and don't complete thoughts. I have to club them over the head with the idea explicitly. Europeans tend to clue in quickly, however. I wonder why? My foreign friends and acquaintances are somehow selected?
Dunno, but I have found that Americans and non-Americans alike have trouble making connections without the conclusion spelled out for them. Simple programming example; consider:
my %hash = ( foo => 42, bar => 123 ); # create a map
Class->new # instantiate class
Class->new( foo => 42 ) # instantiate class, setting foo = 42
Class->new( bar => 123 ) # instantiate class, setting bar = 123
With this in mind, how would you instantiate Class, setting foo to 42 and bar to 123? Many people are stumped, and wouldn't even think to try:
Class->new( foo => 42, bar => 123 )
This confuses me. So I am now careful to spell out conclusions after showing the reader what facts I used to reach them.
