Fig. 2: Shison (Offspring), 1999
economic growth, culminating in the 1960s (which saw Tokyo host the first-ever Olympics in Asia), whereupon the powerful national push inevitably began to slow down. By 1970, when Expo’70 was staged in Osaka against the tumultuous backdrop of the Vietnam War, the growth of Japan’s “homegrown” industrial technology had delivered such a peaceable standard of living that expectations for the future presumed the twenty-first century would see an end to all war and achieve “progress and harmony for mankind” (the official Expo theme). Naturally, things did not go so smoothly. Soon after the close of the Expo, the trade-off for this industrial technology became apparent as environmental pollution was discovered throughout Japan and radical leftist factions went underground to carry out murderous purges and terrorist bombings, plunging the period into darkness. To top it all, the sudden 1973 oil shock threatened energy supplies to import-dependent Japan and threw people into a panic. Society-wide uncertainties cast long shadows over the cultural sphere. Popular tastes ran to doomsday readings such as science fiction novelist Sakyo Komatsu’s Nihon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks), cartoonist Jiro Tsunoda’s supernatural thriller Ushiro no Hyakutaro, or essayist Ben Goto’s sensational Nostradamus no Daiyogen (Prophesies of Nostradamus), followed in 1974 by an unprecedented “occult boom” after celebrity psychic Uri Geller visited Japan. All these dystopian developments ran in direct opposition to the bright future foreseen by Expo ’70, leaving many Japanese fully willing to believe a sixteenth-century French psalm about a 1999 apocalypse (as set forth in Goto’s book,
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which sold a record one million copies in only three months). Incredible as it may seem today, a vast sector of the public
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