When I was a teenager living in Tokyo, I was told to imagine a dystopia for homework. I wrote a Japanified Handmaid’s Tale, where women were mandated to fully concen-trate on their biological functions. I included a scene in which teenage girls in class-rooms fed robot babies, while a metallic voice on an intercom told them that they were “baby-making machines.” This was an actual quote by Japan’s health minister in 2007, I commented, in a heavy-handed footnote. I handed it in, then forgot about it.

My school was in between Shibuya and Harajuku, which was as central Tokyo as you could get. The building was designed to be earthquake-proof; L-shaped and extra-bendy, it was supposed to absorb shockwaves better. When we did earthquake drills, we would rip into the emergency kits, snap open the aluminum-foil blankets and wrap them around our bodies like capes, giggling. As we opened these packages, the in-struction leaflet advised us to avoid being near buildings, that it was better to be in an open field. The irony that our school was in a high-rise building was not lost on us. Our teachers told us that we should hide underneath a table instead of running outside, where glass shards and billboards could fall from above.

When the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit in 2011, I was sick at home. My best friend texted me photos of our peers sleeping on the floor of our school, cocooned in those same aluminum foil capes. The trains weren’t running, she explained: There was no way to get home. A month later, I went to volunteer in the tsunami-ravaged re-gions in the north of Japan. I saw crumpled cars layered like Lego, buses that, swept up by a wave, now balanced on top of buildings. There it was, actualized: the destruc-tion that always seemed to hover in our peripheral vision as a possibility during my teen years in Tokyo.

Is there any city more inextricably linked to ruin than Tokyo? It has long been the can-vas for projections of a dystopian future. In the city’s beginnings in the early 17th cen-tury, when it was called Edo, a girl named Yaoya Oshichi burned the city down for love. Oshichi, or so the story goes, met a handsome temple page during one of the many great fires of the period. Consumed by desire and convinced that the only way she could see him again was through another great fire, she decided to light a match. She was soon aflame on a stake, burned for the crime of arson. I’ve always been drawn to woodcut prints depicting the story, showing Oshichi looking down at the crackling city. Was it longing for a boy she had met once, or was it awe at the scale of destruction that she—a 16-year-old greengrocer’s daughter—could wreak in the name of love? In those early prints, devastation was already an aesthetic. Tokyo burned as a metaphor for the dangers of unbridled desire.

Tokyo’s association with disaster has long been fodder for the artistic imagination, but it is grounded in fact. Consider the city’s many historical ravishments: the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, depicted by Hayao Miyazaki in The Wind Rises as a bellowing, rippling roar that flung houses into the air at high noon. Or the Great Tokyo Air Raid in 1945, when the United States dropped 1,665 tons of bombs on the city in a single night. Or the Aum Shinrikyo attacks in 1995, in which cult members released sarin gas in the Tokyo subways. The death count was a dozen—tiny, compared to the catastro-phes that preceded it—but it terrorized a nation that had started to forget how it felt to be under attack.

Given a decent imagination, this storm of domestic, foreign and cosmic forces can spi-ral to an infinity of apocalyptic futures: Tokyo burns, Tokyo falls, Tokyo reemerges.

It’s no surprise that the king of monsters was born here. Since it first emerged from To-kyo Bay in 1954, Godzilla—or as it’s known in Japan, Gojira—has appeared in nearly three dozen film renditions. “Other global cities, even ones with histories of destruc-tion—San Fransisco and the earthquake, Chicago and the fire, London and its fire, as well as the World War II Blitz—have just never attracted such intense disaster fanta-sies,” says William Tsutsui, president of Hendrix College—and a Godzilla scholar.

I like our king of monsters. I like how, in my favorite Godzilla movies, he never really makes it about himself. Godzilla is inscrutable and unpredictable, and in director Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla (2016), he is a huge, 150-foot prompt for widespread ter-ror, and the subsequent need for a capable government response. He is powered by nuclear radiation, and thus the film is punctuated by politicians hurriedly assuring the public that “the radiation level is not too high, yet.” This feels oddly familiar to Japa-nese viewers, as it should: The film is a spot-on satire of the Japanese government scrambling blindly in the wake of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. “It’s not an earthquake, nor a typhoon,” a politician points out in Shin Godzilla. “It’s a living organ-ism. That means we should be able to stop it.”

Godzilla is man-made (most Godzillas are men in latex suits) and yet larger than man: His unexpected arrival prompts us to wrestle with what the response should be—what laws we should cling to—when we are faced with something even more threatening than a terrorist attack or a climate catastrophe. All states of emergency highlight the deficiencies of any bureaucratic and political system, and the failure of manners—not the monster—is at the heart of the film. After being commanded to do as much re-search as possible to capture the monster, as quickly as possible, a group of wan, gray-haired bureaucrats glance at each other, furtively. One asks: “Excuse me: Which government office did you allocate that to?”

I love how revealingly finicky Godzilla is. In his destruction of Tokyo, he will topple the Tokyo Tower, blaze through the Diet Building and kill most of parliament, but he won’t ever step on the Yasukuni Shrine, or squat on the Imperial Palace. I also like how, as Tsutsui told me, he’s grown taller over the years, expanding to match the rising sky-lines of Japanese cities. He’s been foe and friend, and back again, but the fascination hasn’t ceased. “We have now seen a big reptile destroy Tokyo in much the same way almost three dozen times, and yet we happily come back for more whenever a new sequel is released,” Tsutsui says. He points out how fitting it is that at the end of Shin Godzilla, the monster is frozen with a chemical liquid and turned into a giant statue right next to Tokyo Station. Godzilla literally becomes part of the Tokyo skyline.

Tokyo is also the capital of tech dystopias, thanks mainly to cyberpunk—the genre of sci-fi futures in which technological advancements are juxtaposed against societal breakdowns. As we clocked in 2019 at a party in New York, an American friend re-minded me eagerly that we were now squarely in the year of Blade Runner. “Wasn’t that, like, set in Tokyo?” he asked. As I shook my head, another friend insisted that it was, in fact, set in a postmodern fusion of cities—a San Francisco-Tokyo hybrid. They were both wrong: It was set in Los Angeles, but a Los Angeles overlaid with the Tokyo-as-aesthetic, Tokyo-as-detail cyberpunk vision. For director Ridley Scott, Tokyo was the city of chrome, holograms, grunge and bonsai—the neon inspiration behind a now-dated prophecy that Japan would become a global superpower, the US would lag behind, and there’d be a knotty relationship with technology and robots.

“Once we wipe the neon smog from our eyes, we are left with some questions. How much of the dystopian menace of Blade Runner is due to the alien feel of a future in which bilingual neon kanji signs and Japanese ads flash in every corner of an American city?”

I wish I could say that I hadn’t liked cyberpunk as much as I did, that I hadn’t torn through the sci-fi novels of William Gibson as a teenager, sitting on the carpeted floor of a bookstore in Shinjuku. But I had. Once upon a time, I’d luxuriated in the way in which Japanese seemed to breed with ease with the English language in Gibson novels—sarariman, gaijin, idol—words used without clunky definitions or italics, sen-tences that seemed to demand a reader familiar with Japanese. In Gibson’s imagina-tion, the slow, aging suburb I lived in was Chiba City, said with a hush, where things happened in the dystopian underworld. There was an egotism to my liking it, as well as a skewed feeling of being seen, for where were the Japanese names in Penguin Classics? The realization that Gibson used Tokyo as dystopian garnish, that Japanese names were used for exotic one-note effect, that Chiba could’ve been called Hakone, or Tsukiji, or anything that “sounded Japanese”—would come later.

Blade Runner’s core themes are about identity—is Deckard a robot, or human? And thus, the film’s conspicuous lack of Asian bodies is more than a little jarring. Once we wipe the neon smog from our eyes, we are left with some questions. How much of the dystopian atmosphere is attributed to the threat of the robot-replicants, and how much of the menace is due to the alien feel of a future in which bilingual neon kanji signs and Japanese ads flash in every corner of an American city?

Blade Runner was released on June 25, 1982. Just two days before, two white auto-workers had clubbed Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American, to death in Detroit. They’d thought he was Japanese. The shadows of the rhetoric they’d used—“It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work”—is part of the malevolence of the world of Blade Runner. Fear and exclusion have always accompanied the development of machines and technology: Who gets to create and control them, and who will guard the guards? This injects a particular kind of menace to the idea that is a core of cyber-punk, to the idea of Tokyo-as-dystopia.

Today, there are no cartwheeling robots, but the imagined worlds that still make up the stuff of films—think Scarlett Johansson, or other white characters, walking around an aestheticized landscape that evokes Tokyo as garnish, and possibly, as threat—are hardly different.

Six years after Blade Runner was originally released, a Japanese animator named Katsuhiro Otomo set his dystopian Tokyo in 2019, in an obvious homage to the film. Akira, however, starts 31 years after a nuclear bomb wiped out Tokyo, at the end of World War III. In this groundbreaking animated film, Neo-Tokyo—like today’s Tokyo—is preparing for the 2020 Olympic Games. It’s an errant thought, but one worth asking: Why do we thrill at the idea of reaching the year of dystopias?

In the opening sequence, a boy in a red jumpsuit, Kaneda, tears forth on a red motor-bike, his wheels snapping green hairs of electricity. He swings into the streets of Neo-Tokyo, filled with crushed cars. Skyscrapers seem to glow from within, blood-red and orange and sickening green, and an Ebisu god chortles to himself in a hologram ad-vertisement. Welcome to Tokyo, where the aesthetic is very much cyberpunk—but cy-berpunk as envisioned by Katsuhiro Otomo, who was committed, as he said in a 1993 interview, to showing Tokyo as a character in the film.

“There’s an oppressiveness about the way he angles his camera—we are constantly looking up,” says Susan Napier, professor of rhetoric and Japanese at Tufts. “Only in animation can the city really be brought out as an entity in itself; it takes up the screen.” Napier has long argued that animation’s delight in highlighting the unreal and the un-likely makes it an ideal medium for science fiction and dystopias. She may have been talking about the body—in Akira, the antihero’s body morphs and transforms in an un-forgettably grotesque coda—but her idea can be applied to cityscapes, too. For the first 11 minutes of the film, we can’t see the sky—every gap between buildings is filled with more buildings, and even when the camera pans up, we just see more skyscraper. We are pushed up against an immense feeling of claustrophobia.

Dystopian and apocalyptic narratives often incorporate the idea that leaving is impos-sible. Tokyo’s ambiguous boundaries, its never-ending-ness, particularly suits this theme. In apocalyptic films—like Shin Godzilla, for example—the first crisis is the air-ports shutting down, and then the trains, and then even car travel. Only Godzilla can go where he wishes, on his whim.

Susan Napier notes, “Tokyo is kind of this amorphous entity that you can project things onto.” She adds that in the apocalyptic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is set in a city named Tokyo-3, the cityscape is also a generic, could-be-anywhere canvas; Mt. Fuji is much more prominent than the city itself. William Tsutsui agrees: “Considering that Tokyo does not have a well-defined or famous skyline, it’s somewhat surprising to me that it has become such a favorite for apocalypse in a very visual age.”

In Akira, power is projected onto the figure of the Colonel, a military man who alone has the mobility to traverse all of Tokyo, from the inner sanctums of parliament to the skies. He’s committed to stopping those who might try to control the vast telekinetic force of a mysterious figure and usher in ruin. He can’t. Tetsuo, the small, crouching antihero of the film—first introduced as a frail, low-level lackey in the motorcycle gang—finds himself controlling this growing telekinetic force. Like Yaoya Oshichi, the girl who burned Edo to the ground, we see Tetsuo stunned, and rather ecstatic, at the level of destruction his small body can wreak. This leads to a final showdown between the two at the newly built Olympic Stadium, which ends with the stadium—and most of Neo-Tokyo—swallowed into an orb of all-destroying white light.

And again, Tokyo falls. But Tokyo claps the dust of destruction off its knees, and gets up, as it always has, after the fires of Edo, after Godzilla’s ruinous rampages. In the dystopian mirror of cyberpunk, Tokyo rebuilds and survives, at least until 2019. In the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s promotion for the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics, we see the opening sequence of Akira’s Neo-Tokyo spliced with similar-looking build-ings in the current skyline. The idea of ruin sells. A sanitized version of it, anyway. The promotional video cuts to a generic shot of fireworks, well before Neo-Tokyo erupts in-to flames. That, I can imagine Japanese politicians murmuring, would have been flirt-ing a little too wildly with karma.

There’s a scene in Akira, in which a scientist and the Colonel ride a glass elevator, looking out at Tokyo—a vast, complex and forbidding network of green neon. The sci-entist comments that he thought the Colonel had always hated the city, to which the Colonel responds: “The passion to build has cooled and the joy of reconstruction for-gotten. Now it’s just a garbage heap made up of hedonistic fools.” “Yes,” the scientist replies. “But you’re still trying to save it.”