Vertical, Spacious, and Cosmopolitan: Geographical Imaginations of Hong Kong in a Japanese Artist’s Anime Fan Arts
Introduction
Hong Kong is a complex place. She is a unique hybrid of Chineseness and Coloniality, bearing complex history as the meeting point between the East and the West (Carroll 2007). She is also a vertical-volumetric city with rhythms of urban life defined by escalators, elevators, pedestrian bridges, stairs, and hillside slopes (Shelton et al. 2011). Other than these obvious aspects, there are some often overlooked beauties of Hong Kong: she is an East Asian celebration of multiculturalism which upholds ‘social justice for all’ as the pillar for its intercultural and interethnic harmony (Arat et al. 2022). Finally, she is also an Asian icon for balancing between urban development and natural environment protection, accommodating the residence of 8 million people while conserving over 40% of its total land (Environment and Ecology Bureau 2024).
As a Hong Kong citizen, these are all the aspects of Hong Kong I know. However, is Hong Kong known the same way by the others, especially, her Asian neighbours? As Said (2003) reminds us, a region can be imagined differently, unfortunately often in homogenized ways by the outsiders. To explore these ‘imaginative geographies’, an effective way would be through art works, which is ‘a pictorial way of representing or symbolising human surroundings’ (Cosgrove and Jackson 1987: 96). Simply saying, the portraits of landscapes in arts are far from neutral or objective; instead, they symbolize a certain social discourse around the place depicted, or where the art is located (Cosgrove 1984). For example, if we deploy such way of thinking to architectural landscape, the knife-like Bank of China Tower standing at the central business district (CBD) inHong Kong symbolizes the unbreakable lineage of Hong Kong to China amid British reign during colonial time (Cartier 1997, figure 1).
Figure 1: Photo of 1997 Hong Kong Island CBD landscape. Bank of China Tower is the tallest building at the right (Source: Cartier 1997)
A Japanese anime artist, Takeuchi Ryosuke (@ryosuketarou on X), recently released a bunch of fan art drawings for several famous anime series with Hong Kong streetscapes as backgrounds. As a human geographer, I see these pictures as reflecting the imaginations of Hong Kong from a Japanese’s perspective. In the following, I will briefly introduce all these pictures. Then, I will discuss how Hong Kong is imagined in these drawings, and conclude with a remark on aspects of Hong Kong silenced from these geographical imaginations.
The Pictures
There are 6 artworks I collected in total. All of them depict characters from popular Japanese anime series of this season, with a real Hong Kong streetscape as background. I introduce them in chronological order of their date of publication.
Serie (the girl on the right) and Flamme (the kid on the left) from Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End at 7 Staunton Street
2. Frieren (the girl with white hair) and Fern (the kid with purple hair) from Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End at somewhere of Des Voeux Road Central [1]
3. Yoru (on the left) and Fami (on the right) from Chain Saw Man at 46 Graham Street
4. All main characters from Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End at the Queen’s Road Central-Wyndham Street Junction
5. Maomao (the girl in green hair in the centre), Jinshi (the man with purple hair in the centre) and the other main characters from The Apothecary Diaries at 15 Willington Street
6. Goju Satoru (on the left) and Geto Suguru (on the right) from Jujutsu Kaisen at 1001 King’s Road
A Blend Streetscape
Juxtaposing all images, we can clearly observe an overall pattern of colour. Other than the one showing Apothecary Diaries, all other pictures are in cool tones, characterised by the frequent use of colours like grey, green, white etc. They are not dark, though. Instead, most colours are used in a desaturated way, giving some sort of lightness to the urban background. Overall saying, the artist conveys a blended, cool, but not overwhelming view of Hong Kong’s streetscape through colour, which would be brightened up by the highlighted anime characters.
A Vertical City
Verticality is a very common theme in the imaginary Hong Kong here. Built along the steep terrain of Hong Kong Island, the city is born to be vertical, offering a never-ending up-and-down journey (Frampton et al. 2012). It is so profound that it symbolizes Hong Kong in these pictures: in picture 1, Serie and young Flamme are walking up the steep stairs of hillside Central; in picture 3, Yoru and Fami are standing on the slope of Graham Street, with blocks of concrete buildings staggering upon one another behind them; in the 5th picture, the protagonists are enclosed by the valley of Willington Street, and what above and behind them are colourful hanging signs of entertainment and modernist skyscrapers. Further to note, the imaginations of vertical streetscapes here are enjoyable, as reflected by the featured characters’ casual actions and relaxed facial expressions. Many commentators from Europe or the US criticize urban verticality as a luxurious symbol (Graham 2015), inter-social-class oppression (Neill 2013), and land of army surveillance (Weizman 2007). These devilish ‘hollowing out’ of vertical cityscapes can hence be contested (Harris 2015), and beautifully filled with everyday liveliness in this artist’s imagination of vertical Hong Kong. It is perhaps not surprising an artist from Tokyo would have this positive imagination of a vertical city. Afterall, Tokyo and Hong Kong are both metropolises dominated by skyscrapers, elevators, and underground streets. What is fascinating is that through a Japanese artist’s artistic depiction of Hong Kong’s vertical landscapes, we can see an alternative, optimistic discourse of vertical city from an East Asian context.
How Crowded is Hong Kong?
Hong Kong is no doubt a city overcrowded with a population density of over 7000 people per sq. km of land area (World Bank 2024). The picture of a cramped city is not silent in these fan arts, too. In the two drawings featuring all characters from The Apothecary Diaries and Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, we can see the characters all cramped into either one narrow street, or one single road junction. Behind them are even more faceless crowds. For picture 6 featuring Gojo and Geto from Jujutsu Kaisen, while the street seems spacious, what behind them is in fact the ‘Monster Building’ of Hong Kong, another symbolic landscape of Hong Kong’s crowdedness (right for an extended view of the building, Photo from Mak 2019). It is interesting, though, that the artist put the focus on the open ground level and let this populated building to stay as a rather insignificant background. Whether this is purposeful or not, this makes the background of picture 6 look relatively sparse, rendering it less crowded than the other two pictures mentioned. This makes me question whether Hong Kong is necessarily a cramped city. Further looking at the other three pictures left, the artist also offers a different imagination of Hong Kong streetscapes as rather pleasantly uncrowded, with wide staircases, sloppy roads, and crossing. Again, it is fascinating the Japanese artist imagines Hong Kong so differently compared with many European-American photographers and scholars: Hong Kong is not necessarily an exhaustingly overcrowded megacity, but, rather, can be a relaxingly spacious place to live and travel through.
East, West, or Neither?
Bearing nearly two centuries of British colonial history, but ethnically Chinese, Hong Kong is usually portrayed as a unique mixture between ‘the East’ (Asian-Chinese) and ‘the West’ (European-American) (Chu 2018). This hybridity can also be found somewhere in the pictures. In picture 1, an Italian restaurant is just behind Serie and Flamme is, with British military police wall painting as its exterior design; this is even more apparent if we connect this virtual streetscape with its real form. As shown in comparison, the restaurant in fact has several national flags hanging upon it, including Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England. Although the author did not include those in the drawing, it has been hinted at the imaginary connection between Hong Kong and the British Empire.
However, in all the other pictures, there are very few clues on cultural heritage that symbolize Chineseness or Coloniality. What is shown in them are essentially combinations of concrete blocks, metallic vehicles, and glass walls. These features are modern, but they combine to produce a ‘placeless’ landscape, with very little socio-cultural distinctiveness that can resonate any sense of a particular place (Relph 1976).
Yet saying the artist is offering a placeless imagination of Hong Kong is clearly paradoxical. Rather, I would argue that the artist sees Hong Kong neither as an urban legacy of the Colonial Empire, nor as a Chinese metropolis. If glancing through this artist’s portfolio, such landscapes of concrete, steel and glass in fact feature very frequently in his work, with many of them having a background somewhere either in Tokyo, or in Hong Kong. And when the characters are featured, no matter what kind of story background they are from, they would be dressed in fashioned modern clothing. This is very clear in the group photos of The Apothecary Story (picture 5) and Frieren: Beyond the Journey’s End (picture 4). For the former, the story is based in ancient China where characters were dressed in traditional Chinese clothing (figure 2). For the latter, it is based in an imaginative European middle age, where the characters were dressed in fantasized clothes. I would hence suggest that Hong Kong is imagined as a modernist cosmopolitan city, rather than specifically affiliated with any of its historical-cultural traditions.
Figure 2: Maomao from the Apothecary Diary in traditional Chinese clothing
Conclusion
All these fan arts allow us to read the geographical imaginations of Hong Kong from a Japanese’s narrative. It is perhaps not surprising that many aspects such as crowdedness and verticality devilized in Euro-American discourses are optimistically pictured here by an Artist residing in Tokyo, a city with landscapes closely resembling Hong Kong. In these artworks, the vertical dimension of Hong Kong is lively and can be traversed through happily; the crowdedness is hardly a serious obstacle; and Hong Kong is transcending from just hybridity of its Chineseness and Coloniality to a cosmopolitan metropolis.
Before ending, it should be noted, though, that this optimistic reading of Hong Kong cityscape is nonetheless silencing some realities of Hong Kong. While acknowledging her cosmopolitan nature, the artist did not particularly give attention to multiculturalism in Hong Kong. At the same time, the hilly, greenish mountain ridges that Hong Kong cityscapes fit on are hardly seen anywhere within these pictures.
[1] This one is slightly ambiguous as it depicts minimal recognizable streetscapes. I speculate its real location.
Reference:
Arat, G, N.N. Kerelian, M. Dhar (2022) ‘Multiculturalism with Hong Kong characteristics: a qualitative study’ in Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 20, 1, 191-211.
Cosgrove, D.E. and P. Jackson (1987) ‘New directions in cultural geography’, Area 19, 2, 95–101.
Environment and Ecology Bureau (2024) Conservation, Hong Kong: Environment and Ecology Bureau (https://www.eeb.gov.hk/en/conservation/conservation_maincontent.html#:~:text=About%20another%207%20700%20hectares%20of%20Hong%20Kong%27s,40%25%20of%20total%20land%20area%20in%20Hong%20Kong; 25/03/2024).
Carroll, J. M. (2007) A Concise History of Hong Kong, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
World Bank (2024) Population density (people per sq. km of land area) – Hong Kong SAR, China (Population density (people per sq. km of land area) - Hong Kong SAR, China | Data (worldbank.org); 26/03/2024)
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Neill, K. L. O., and B. Fogarty-Valenzuela (2013) ‘Verticality’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, 2, 378–389.
Weizman, E. (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso.
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Relph, E.C. (1976) Place and Placelessness, London: Pion.
Photo source: Takeuchi Ryosuke (@ryosuketarou on X)
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