Japanese science fiction

Science fiction in Japan is an important subgenre of modern Japanese literature that has strongly influenced aspects of contemporary Japanese pop culture, including anime, manga, video games, tokusatsu, and cinema.

Both Japan's history of technology and mythology play a role in the development of its science fiction. Some early Japanese literature, for example, contain elements of proto-science fiction. The early Japanese tale of "Urashima Tarō" involves traveling forwards in time to a distant future, and was first described in the Nihongi (720). It was about a young fisherman named Urashima Taro who visits an undersea palace and stays there for three days. After returning home to his village, he finds himself three hundred years in the future, where he is long forgotten, his house in ruins, and his family long dead. The 10th-century Japanese narrative The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter may also be considered proto-science fiction. The protagonist of the story, Kaguya-hime, is a princess from the Moon who is sent to Earth for safety during a celestial war, and is found and raised by a bamboo cutter in Japan. She is later taken back to the Moon by her real extraterrestrial family. A manuscript illustration depicts a round flying machine similar to a flying saucer. However, science fiction in the standard sense did not begin until the Meiji Restoration and the importation of Western ideas.

The first science fiction of any influence to be translated into Japanese were the novels of Jules Verne. The translation of Around the World in Eighty Days was published in 1878-1880, followed by his other works with immense popularity. The word kagaku shōsetsu (科学小説^?) was coined as a translation of "scientific novel" as early as 1886.

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