Akira and the explosion of Tokyo in culture

The 1980s in Japan was marked by a prosperous moment in the economy. When the real estate bubble and the stock market burst, Tokyo emerged as a thriving place of extreme economic optimism. At this moment, it was transformed into the place we know — a symbol of opulence, luxury, and capitalist euphoria. But all this cloud of hope would come crashing down years later. In 1991, this entire bubble truly burst, leading to what we study as the “Lost Decade.”

Amidst this, a manga film released in 1988 seemed to have given a preview of this collapse. Akira, by Katsuhiro Otomo, was drawn starting in 1982 in serialized chapters, expanding over more than two thousand pages until 1990.

The film condensed only part of the narrative but managed to create an immediate cultural impact. In it, Tokyo is destroyed by a mysterious explosion and rebuilt as Neo-Tokyo, a futuristic city that carries both the memory of destruction and the contradictions of modernity.

Otomo's imagery derived from very concrete references. The destruction of the city spoke directly to the trauma of the atomic bomb, something still alive in the Japanese collective memory, but also anticipated the effects of rampant urbanization and political instability.

Neo-Tokyo is marked by state authoritarianism, police violence, motorcycle gangs, and a youth that finds no place in the present. Shotaro Kaneda and Tetsuo Shima, the central characters, are a translation of this, marginalized individuals who gain absolute power and return it in the form of chaos, a metaphor for Japan's own social tension.

The central problem of the film, aside from the post-apocalyptic setting, arises when Tetsuo accidentally encounters a psychic child and is taken for government experiments that develop telekinetic powers. Everything culminates in a confrontation with the legendary entity known as Akira, resulting in the destruction and renewal of the city.

However, the story gains depth by addressing social and political issues, primarily the alienation of youth, directly associated with the militarized system and the government’s negligence that becomes corrupt.

The aesthetics of Akira are fundamental to its reach. Unlike other manga and anime of the time, Otomo bet on extreme detail in settings, architecture, and machines.

Each frame was filled with realistic buildings, industrial corridors, and layers of decaying technology. This created a visual density that the film reproduced with over 160,000 frames, an unprecedented investment in Japanese animation. Kaneda's red jacket, futuristic motorcycles, and urban graphics became instantly recognizable visual icons.

An astonishing total of 327 different colors were used, with 50 of them specially created for the film.

When the film reached the West in the late 1980s, it opened a cultural fissure.

It was one of the first Japanese animations to be showcased in American and European cinemas outside of the niche circuit, presenting an adult, violent, and politicized language. The Wachowski brothers cited the work as a reference, and its presence can be traced in Matrix.

This reach was not limited to cinema. The synthesized visual culture of Akira entered into dialogue with fashion and streetwear from the 2000s onward, when the circulation of bootlegs of Kaneda's jacket and printed t-shirts from independent stores began to appear worldwide, along with the hype of ‘cult’ culture.

Rei Kawakubo joined forces with Katsuhiro Otomo in a collaboration for the Spring/Summer campaign of Comme des Garcons. The campaign art accompanied a reinterpretation and coloring done by Rei Kawakubo on the manga comics, forging a visual that engages between the raw and lonely energy of Akira and the disruptive energy of CDG.

The turning point was the Supreme collaboration in 2017, which formalized this relationship, in addition to communicating with a separate audience that the New York brand connected with in 2017.

The artists also absorbed this imagery. Kanye West, in 2010, released the music video for Stronger with an aesthetic inspired by Akira. But it was with Supreme and later with fragments by Otomo used in fashion editorials that the transition was consolidated and the manga became a deep aesthetic source.

The transition from manga to animation emerged at a moment of optimism and crisis in 1980s Japan, portraying the trauma of post-World War destruction and anticipating issues like urban instability, projecting itself as a global aesthetic and a tactile universe in clothing, collaborations, and symbols.