The NeoTokyo that was promised

Abstract 

Two decades before Tokyo was elected as the host city for the 32nd Olympic Games in 2020, the manga artist Katsushiro Otomo predicted in one of his most prominent works, «Akira», that these games wouldn’t happen. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mass destruction and reconstruction have influenced part of the creative line of work of many Japanese artists. Several of the most iconic Manga and Anime pieces, terms that refer to japanese comics and animation specifically, are examples of it. They recurrently focus on multiple catastrophic visions of a future Tokyo. Therefore, this article pretends to go across the streets of Japan’s capital city, analysing how the most iconic Manga and Anime artists have portrayed both its architecture and urbanism from a retro futuristic and post apocalyptic perspective.

Key words

Manga, anime, Tokio, architecture, city.

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