In another coincidence, the Akira series also features some fictional news headlines that would resonate today, one of which reads: “The World Health Organization criticises the measures taken against the pandemic. The fictional Olympic Stadium was built near the ruins of that explosion – a clear allusion to the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – as a symbol of recovery, Gaumer told AFP. Since his breakthrough win in 2019, Morikawa has steadily climbed in the Official World Golf Ranking and cemented his status as one of the game’s elite with a major victory at the 2020 PGA.
In the same way, the Tokyo 2020 Games in Akira could be seen as the authorities “reasserting their glory after the destruction” of the fictional 1982 explosion, said Patrick Gaumer, a manga expert. The Japanese government framed Tokyo 2020 as the “Recovery Games”, aiming to show how the country had bounced back from the devastating 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Images of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Stadium construction site, with red and white cranes poking from an oval structure, were a striking reminder to Akira fans of the way it was depicted in the comic. “The story unfolds in a way that suggests a cancellation or a postponement (of the Olympics) is inevitable,” Kaichiro Morikawa, expert on Japanese pop culture at Tokyo’s Meiji University, told AFP. In an example of life imitating art, the real countdown clocks at Tokyo 2020 headquarters have now been replaced with a sign that reads “under consideration”. While the Olympics are not central to the plot, Tokyo 2020 appears several times in the story, with uncanny if coincidental similarities to the real Games, now postponed until next year. A futuristic and high-tech world but with a huge gap between the rich and the downtrodden,” said Matthieu Pinon, a specialist on Japanese manga and anime. “The world of Akira can be summed up in one word: cyberpunk. His organs were buried deep underground in an iron box – on the construction site of the Olympic Stadium – only to be found later by another boy called Tetsuo who eventually inherits his powers. It tells the story of a boy called Akira, who acquired psychic superpowers from a secret military programme but became so powerful he was disintegrated. The action takes place in a dystopian 2019 set in a sinister megacity called “neo-Tokyo”, built after the old capital was destroyed in a mysterious explosion in 1982 that set off World War III. An anime version came out in 1988 and became a global sci-fi hit. With the announcement that the Tokyo 2020 Olympics have been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the coincidence has led to Akira trending on Japanese social media with fans hailing its mystic powers.Ĭreated by Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira first appeared in comic form, with thousands of pages produced between 19. Not a scene from real life but from Akira, a remarkably prescient cult Japanese manga series. TOKYO (AFP) – Next to a countdown showing the number of days to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics is scrawled “just cancel it”.
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