Betty Stojnic
Graduate School of Humanities,
Nagoya University, Japan
Eurocentric discussions of “Japanese technology” tend to follow a remarkably consistent
pattern. In casual conversation, it may look something like this: Person 1 will say: “Wow, Japan! It must be so futuristic!” Person 2, who is for whatever reason more informed about Japan than Person 1, then retorts: “Not at all! They still use fax machines.”
This exchange is as typical of workplace chit-chat as it is of international reporting on Japan and its famously “glacial” journey toward digitization (see Fitzpatrick, 2015, Power, 2023, and Liew & Tan, 2025). The presence of fax machines, cash-only shops, and the only recently retired floppy disk clashes with the stereotypical image of Japan as a high-tech and hyper-efficient nation of robots, bullet trains, and impossibly dense urban vistas.
Person 1’s assumption that Japan is “futuristic” can be described as a relatively benign form of techno-Orientalism. As Edward Said argues, Orientalism is the West’s main method of producing its Other (the “non-West,” the opposite of assumed “Western” qualities and values), usually by simultaneously exoticizing and denigrating the “East” (the “Orient”), and thus justifying the primacy of Western cultural forms and norms (i.e. of Western hegemony; Said, 1979/1978). However, rather than being “primitive” or “backwards,” techno-Orientalism presupposes that the Orient is extraordinarily technologically advanced, in a way that confuses, disturbs, fascinates, and/or alienates the Western observer. The history and mechanisms of this presupposition are by no means simple or unidirectional; as I hope to show, even the most banal techno-Orientalist images of the “East” – of its bullet trains and fax machines – contain productive contradictions, as well as the potential for a philosophical reconsideration of how we imagine the future as such.
Techno-Orientalism
Sociologists David Morley and Kevin Robins (1992, 1995) coined the term “techno-Orientalism” to describe the “Japan panic” that swept Western Europe and the U.S. in the 1980s and early ‘90s, when Japan came close to becoming the world’s number one economy. The West’s anxious fascination with Japan’s technological and economic ascent resulted in the mass production of Japan-related media, political theory, and news reportage, which often expressed either admiration or outright hostility toward the potential future superpower. Objects like the Sony Walkman suddenly held great geopolitical significance. Science fiction works like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) or William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) abounded with simulacric East Asian motifs and settings, turning the feared Asian technological takeover into a source of pleasurable aesthetic estrangement. Techno-Orientalist discourses were also overtly racist, characterising people in Japan as “robotic,” inhuman, and atomised to the point of total asociality. Though Morely and Robins’ observations are now several decades old (and perceptibly so, given how much Japan’s global economic position has changed over time), the political and cultural processes they describe form the foundation of Person 1’s stereotypical, “futuristic” impression of Japan.
In response to Morley and Robins, many authors in Japan cautioned that techno-Orientalism was not simply a unilateral imposition from the West, but a reciprocal process through which Japan could define itself against the West and its own “Others.” Iwabuchi Kōichi (1994) argues that Japan’s own political “power bloc” is often complicit in the country’s Orientalisation, strategically using claims about the “uniqueness” of Japanese culture (e.g. its “collectivism” or “efficiency”) to dismiss internal heterogeneous voices, stifle political resistance, and create a West/Japan binary that disregards other Asian countries and affirms Japan’s centrality in the region. Ueno Toshiya (1996) puts Japan’s pop culture under a similar microscope, arguing that cyberpunk anime like Ghost in the Shell (1995, dir. Oshii Mamoru) reproduce an always-illusory image of Japan through which the “Japanese [also] misunderstand themselves” (p. 95).
However, as Ueno points out, the creators of Ghost in the Shell modelled the film’s setting not on Japan, but on Hong Kong, where the animation team even travelled to scout for locations. For Japan, other parts of Asia are not only a material and economic resource, but also a resource for “images of the future” (Ueno, 1999, p. 98). Techno-Orientalism is therefore not only a product of the West’s “Japan panic,” but a multifaceted phenomenon that also subsumes Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, China, and India (among others) into reductive visions of global technological advancement. Techno-Orientalist discourses differ depending on which self/Other relation they are being used to reinforce (West/Japan, West/China, Japan/Asia, etc.). Nevertheless, for the West, the assertion of Western superiority remains the bottom line. For example, the Oriental Other may be accused of “cheating” on the global economic stage, either literally (e.g. by releasing inflated GDP statistics [see: Tao, 2024]) or more abstractly by transgressing Western moral boundaries of “fair” market competition (Morely and Robins, 1995, p. 152) or labour exploitation (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 4-5). As a corollary, Western economic expansion and technological development can then be presented as humane, honest, and non- exploitative.
Excavating the Orient for “images of the future” creates not only a geographic and cultural, but also a temporal divide between “East” and “West.” Criticising the popular claim that “China is the future,” Gabriele de Seta (2020) points out that techno-Orientalism functions as a “denial of coevalness,” as theorised by anthropologist Johannes Fabian. Once the Orient is placed in “the future” (or the “primitive past”), its existence and participation in the contemporary moment is denied. The Orient is always either too late or too early, but it can never be contemporary to (i.e. coeval with) the West. Thus, techno-Orientalism, even when it inspires admiration for the “futurity” of the Oriental Other, frames the West’s relationship to the Other as a kind of time travel rather than as genuine communication or cooperation.
To return to the introductory dialogue, while Person 1 and Person 2 have different impressions of Japan, they equally deny Japan its coevalness. As far as Person 2 is concerned, Person 1 is mistaken not because they have an exotified image of Japan, but because they are exotifying Japan in the wrong direction. “Not to worry, Person 1,” Person 2 suggests. “The Other’s futurity is completely illusory. I have looked into their offices and they still have fax machines.” Japan is flung from the future back into backwardness with the mention of a single “obsolete” technological object. Not only is time itself implicitly measured in consumer electronics, but it is only the technological commodities familiar to the speaker that belong to the present, with everything else being deemed either outdated or useful only to an inscrutable and alien “future” race.
Futurism(s)
While techno-Orientalist discourses ultimately serve to entrench the West’s position as the cultural, sociopolitical, and even temporal centre of the world, their complexity and internal contradictions of fear, hostility, and admiration have inspired a broad range of critical responses. As David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu argue, the techno-Orientalist gaze opens up opportunities “for critical reappropriations in texts that self-referentially engage with Asian images” (2015, p. 7). In other words, images of a futuristic “East” can become a vehicle for critiques of Orientalism, as well as a dialogue about what kind of future we can imagine if we no longer assume that Western modernity is the only or best path.
Many authors use techno-Orientalism as an entry point to interrogate the position of the Oriental Other in light of globalisation and increased intercultural exchange. Tatsumi Takayuki (2006) analyses postmodern literature and art (particularly science fiction) from Japan and the United States, arguing that the dynamic ways in which they play off each other challenge the notions of Western “originality” and Oriental “mimicry” or copying. Charles Park (2015) discusses Nam June Paik’s TV-Buddha, an artwork consisting of a Buddha statuette looking at an image of itself on a TV screen, as a demonstration of the fluidity of “East” and “West” as avenues of mutual, technologically mediated transformations. Approaching the “techno” in “techno-Orientalism” from a wholly different angle, Ueno (1999) sees ‘90s rave culture as an opportunity for “inter-East” cooperation, where “East” encompasses not only Asia, but also post-socialist Europe and diasporic communities within the West (pp. 102-3). These approaches aim to dismantle the idea
that there is such a thing as an “essential” West or an “essential” East, and to explore how
media technologies can help reveal, rather than obscure, the complexity and instability of the West/East divide.
Other artists and authors have experimented with “doubling down” on techno-Orientalist stereotypes, creatively co-opting them through various “futurist” projects. Lawrence Lek’s video essay “Sinofuturism (1839 - 2046 AD)” (2016) identifies seven main stereotypes of contemporary Chinese society – Computing, Copying, Gaming, Studying, Addiction, Labour, and Gambling – and embraces them in a playful pastiche of techno-Orientalist cliches. Lek likens Chinese technological advancement to a form of artificial intelligence, turning the dehumanization of Chinese workers on its head and conceptualising it as a form of autonomy both from state control and Western vilification. Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (2018) have likewise proposed “ethnofuturism(s)” as a way to question Eurocentric notions of future and modernity, seeing Sinofuturism, Afrofuturism, and Gulf Futurism, among others, as radical expressions of the heterogeneous experiences of technological development from the perspectives of the West’s Others.
Ethnofuturisms, of course, come with their own risks: As Yuk Hui (2016) points out, digitisation in China has often resulted in a “Sinofuturism” that merely “[accelerates] the European modern project,” with Chinese apps and social media reproducing many of the pernicious effects of their Western counterparts (p. 297). Meanwhile, China’s extensive foreign lending and infrastructural projects in Africa, enabled by the state’s Belt and Road Initiative, further propagate the “modern” “within the countries of [China’s] Third World partners – and in this sense [extend] European modernity through modern technology” (p. 298). Rather than questioning and deconstructing ethnos, ethnofuturisms also run the risk of reinforcing the concept of essential ethnicities, which easily justifies a supremacist and exceptionalist ideology. [1] Ethnofuturist movements must remain critical of the notion that ethnic difference legitimises – or is legitimised by – technological, capitalist, or state expansion, lest they become little more than a faddish version of techno-nationalism.
The Technological Time Axis
While techno-Orientalism is primarily a manifestation of Western hegemony, it helps highlight certain Eurocentric biases and the potential means to overcome them. Whether by destabilising the West/East binary, or by imagining alternative futures through critical ethnofuturisms, the proposed strategies I outlined above tend to have the following in common:
(1) Resistance to essentialism and homogenisation: It is important to question the idea that the “West” or “East” possess fixed, essential qualities, even when these presumed qualities are flattering (such as efficiency or tech-savviness). At the same time, it is equally important to recognise differences in localized experiences, historical contexts, and power relations, and not to reduce the future to a linear narrative about “universal” technoscientific progress.
(2) Resistance to technological time: Constant technological innovation should not be equated with the future in the abstract, but should be understood as a distinct political and economic tendency. A techno-deterministic understanding of time not only results in the denial of the East’s coevalness, but also encourages potentially damaging economic and technological competition (rather than cooperation) between different nation states and power blocs.
With these points in mind, the significance of inventions like the fax machine and the bullet train becomes clearer: The fact that both technologies were developed in 1964 is secondary to their different respective positions on an imaginary technological time axis. In condemning the fax machine, Person 2 treats it not as a tool that can be more or less useful depending on context, but as something that categorically does not belong to the future, or even to the present, despite its actual coexistence with other, more “advanced” commodities that are used daily in Japan. A closer look at the mechanisms of techno-Orientalism thus elucidates not only the portrayal of the Orient as always either “too slow” or “too quick” to modernize, but also the implicit assumptions and expectations we have of technological objects themselves, which tend to come to light only when we encounter them in surprising – if not “exotic” – situations.
Originally published in the magazine "Tvērums" issue "The East" (Fall 2025).
Eseja sākotnēji publicēta žurnāla Tvēruma "Austrumu" numurā (Rudens 2025).
Notes
[1] As Avanessian and Moalemi point out, the term “ethnofuturism” has also been used in right-wing contexts, namely among Estonian ethnonationalists (Avanessian and Moalemi, 2018: pp. 15-20).
References
Avanessian, Armen; Moalemi, Mahan (2018). Ethnofuturisms: Findings in Common and
Conflicting Futures. In: Ethnofuturismen. Merve Verlag.
De Seta, Gabriele (2020). Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism: China’s Future and the Denial of Coevalness. In: SFRA Review 50: 86-94.
Fitzpatrick, Michael (2015). Why Is Hi-Tech Japan Using Cassette Tapes and Faxes?. BBC.
November 3, 2015. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34667380
Hui, Yuk (2016). The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics.
Urbanomic.
Iwabuchi, Kōichi (1994). Complicit Exoticism: Japan and Its Other. In: Continuum 8(2): 49-82.
Liew, Zhi Xin; Tan, Shauna (2025). Why Futuristic Japan Is Falling Behind in Digital Tech.
Channel NewsAsia. July 17, 2025. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/futuristic-
japan-digital-lag-high-tech-image-cyber-vulnerability-5241336
Morley, David; Robins, Kevin (1992). Techno-Orientalism: Futures, Foreigners and Phobias.
New Formations 16: 136-56.
Morley, David; Robins, Kevin (1995). Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries. Routledge.
Park, Charles (2015). A Poor Man from a Poor Country: Nam June Paik, TV-Buddha, and the
Techno-Orientalist Lens. In: Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. Rutgers.
Power, John (2023). Fax Machines and Cash-Only Stores: Japan Struggles to Go Digital. Al
Jazeera. June 1, 2023. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/6/1/fax-machines-and-cash-only-stores-japan-struggles-to-go-digital
Roh, David S.; Huang, Betsy; Niu, Greta A. (2015). Technologizing Orientalism: An Introduction. In: Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. Rutgers.
Said, Edward (1979). Orientalism. Vintage Books.
Tao, Jingzhou (2024). If China’s Statistics Can’t Be Scrutinized, Doubts About the Economy Will Only Grow. Financial Times. November 18, 2024. https://www.ft.com/content/de9af759-2b94-4b7e-98e4-42698900efeb
Tatsumi, Takayuki (2006). Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and
Avant-Pop America. Duke University Press.
Ueno, Toshiya (1996). Japanimation and Techno-Orientalism. ISEA96 Proceedings: Seventh
International Symposium on Electronic Art. ISEA96 Foundation.
Ueno, Toshiya (1999). Techno-Orientalism and Media-Tribalism: On Japanese Animation and Rave Culture. Third Text 47: 95-106.