So this will start off-topic, but bear with me. I'll get there.
My wife and I recently returned from our honeymoon in Tokyo, a city that William Gibson (one of the early cyberpunk writers) described, in the 1980's, as the very essence of the genre.
My wife and I had a blast and I would recommend the trip to yadda yadda yadda.
While I was there, I went looking for the essence of cyberpunk and this journey became the cyberpunk pilgrimage that I shall now describe for you. Don't mind my sporadic tenses, I'm reliving this as I type it and some moments are more relevant than others. Also, this is being typed on my phone.
Electric Town Akihabara
If the internet was a place, it would be Akihabara and we visited often. Crammed together in a truly labyrinthine maze are a couple of dozen vertical malls, including an entire ten-story building called ChompChomp (says so on the building) that we discovered was a food mall with dozens of little restaurants anchored by a couple of larger chains.
There are arcades everyhere. Only a tiny fraction of video games made here ever make it stateside (translation is ludicrously expensive) and the artwork is superb. You can win figures by using the claw machines or you can just buy them at swap shops. Every single sign here competes for your attention, themed cafes have girls in full cosplay outside busking for business. There are ten story porn stores and between the towers, glimpsed passing window is an austere, black building called Mandarake (mon da rock ay) that sells nostalgic toys from as far back as the 70's, their trade comes in every day on trucks carrying private collections and large ebay finds. There are Transformers toys that were only ever released in Japan.
We pass a pachinko den, but don't enter as there is positive pressure created by cigarette smoke, stentorian announcements and intimidating, gold-plated statuary of a western god on a golden throne.
Ueno Village
Ueno Village is the name we gave to a huge, open-air bazaar filled with the voices of the normal reserved locals hawking wares at deafening volume. There are thousands of stands selling everything from designer knock-offs to medicine to fish and fresh noodles built into the bottom floors of apartments (maybe they were garages?) and small offices above, as though a physical storage provider had been turned into a flea market. There were no signs, save for restaurants and it was obvious that this was where the locals did their thing. Everything was reused, from cardboard to bags. Here, the street had found its own uses for things.
There is a yakitori and noodle shop built from cast off particle board that would leak from frequent rainstorms were it not built under the elevated train tracks. The engineers and secretaries shuffling to work overhead would be quietly oblivious that beneath them, voracious, vivacious life was happening lit by christmas lights beneath their feet.
Going to Katsuta
We took a high-speed (not a bullet train. One of those passed us like we were standing still)train for a country excursion and got a train's eye view of a lot of Tokyo and my first real look at a true megacity. Where do I even begin? As you might imagine, there are orderly and very similar looking buildings clumped together in residential districts, but as all laundry is dried outside, every single one of them had its own riotously colorful identity. The place is obsessively clean to the point that even the homeless keep their things orderly and sleep in boxes which they fold up during the day. There are wires and cables everywhere. You could reach out a window and touch one, but Japan assumes that you are not an idiot. Electrical boxes and infrastructure are exposed everywhere and any parkour enthusiast would have died of old age long before he ran out of perches, platforms and bars. It is not obvious at the city center, but there are parks everywhere and people really enjoy them.
Home away from home
There was an old building being torn down about a hundred feet from where we stayed. We never heard a sound. Three floors of building were there when we got there and a dozen or so days later, there was one guy sweeping up pikes of dust on a flat foundation. Whoah.
City of Silence
There is no soundproofing in Tokyo. I know this because I walked past a jpop karaoke bar on country western night. Every conversation is carried out by whisper. This keeps things private and ensures that foreigner can be heard a mile away.
-Shibuya crossing
Our last night was a Sunday and the whole city uses Sunday to decompress, so there were thousands of people from all over the world passing through each other at the famous crossing, every face bathed in hellish neon glow of the riot of signage presiding over them and every face part of a larger narrative. On the promenade, a gaggle of drunk engineers tried to look like they weren't eyeing a gaggle of club ladies made glamorous by impossibly tall heels and the best clothes and bodies money could buy, each looking like walking fetish fuel.
There were teenagers, too. The social pressure to succeed for them is unreal, coupled with never being taken seriously, they rebel on sundays lest their school masters see them. They strut on awkward legs in a riot of styles that both catch and repel they eye.
Our train is the last one back to our place. It is so packed that my wife has her hands in my pockets, both to hold onto me and so no one can pick my pocket (an unnecessary precaution; it is unlikely that there is a safer city on earth than Tokyo). I am jammed so far into a gaggle of older schoolgirls that I can feel their breath on my skin. They seem tipsy and we all stink. I fight the urge to intorduce myself as my lizard brain tells me this level of intimacy demands profuse apologies and self-deprecating jokes. I am 6'4", but at this range, they don't seem intimidated. The train jerks in a turn and I must create chaos as I grab the overhead rails, hot from humanity to keep from falling on an older lady and suddenly, all of my muscles are straining. I look over my shoulder and see people up fron suffering as only the press of humans keeps the old and infirm on their feet. I become the support for half the car I occupy and am treated as a kind of superhero for the rest of the ride.
We did lots of other touristy things, too, but those were not cyberpunk. I hope some GM, somewhere gets some inspiration from this. I know it improved the verisimilitude of my games. I will check this post to see if anyone has questions.
