That depends on which Japan you mean. Let us hope it's not the prosaic one that lives in a decade's grim headlines. Since the bust of the early 1990s, Japan's financial levers have stopped working. Politicians have been rendered impotent by scandal and voter disillusionment, major banks humbled by the markets. Even in the splatter of America's own burst bubble, Japan's bottomless reservoir of bad news seems too dark a model for all but the most dyspeptic futurist.

But there is another Japan: Japan-as-metaphor. This is the Japan that represents hypermodernism in all its dimensions, from advanced technology to individual alienation to urbanization run amok. This stylized notion took root in the '80s amid the country's economic boom. It was a time when Japanese business models, money, and products seemed like irresistible forces. Neuromancer launched cyberpunk onto the streets of a future Japan "where you couldn't see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company." William Gibson's imagined Japan was not the shiny future-perfect of yesterday's world fairs, but instead a hard-edged tomorrow where giant conglomerates ruled and silico-, nano-, and bio- were the main denominations of value. Gibson's message was that disruptive technology would bring with it disruptive social change. And it read like prophecy.

In hindsight, we know that although the cyberpunk vision anticipated many of the social pathologies that would emerge as Japan's economy collapsed, it did not anticipate what has surfaced as a greater threat to Japan's place in the future: irrelevance. The past 10 years have seen a depressing parade of disposable prime ministers, metastasizing concrete, and bankruptcy. And the last time we checked, there were no holograms over Tokyo. Yet it would be wrong to count Japan out just because the future is not what it used to be.

We persuaded William Gibson to go back to Tokyo to have another look. He found, to his own surprise, that his sense of Japan hurtling ever forward has subsided, only to be replaced with a new sense of permanent, yet well-tolerated, chaos. This, Gibson suggests, is the future for all of us. And furthermore, so what? Despite the fact that the country's political and economic institutions lie in shambles, Japanese innovation and creativity continues unabated.

Two years ago, the notion that America's future, then a glowing path of endless prosperity, had anything in common with Japan's was risible. Today, post-Nasdaq, it is less so. Alan Greenspan is starting to feel the pain of his neutered Japanese counterparts. A controversial election cast a cloud over America's political process, and an evaporating surplus is limiting government's clout. Meanwhile, almost $5 trillion of national wealth simply disappeared. Our cyberpunk future has been put on an indefinite hold. But perhaps today's Japan - the Japan beyond the dreary headlines - can reveal more about the shape of things to come than that shimmering vision ever did.

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