Western cyberpunk creators borrowed a lot from Japanese culture in the 1980s — but judging from this video by J-Pop diva Anri, it went both ways. Watch as our heroine puts on her mirror shades and hacks into cyberspace, only to be pursued by a dark avatar.
This amazing 1980s time capsule is the video for Anri's "Groove A Go Go," which is a blend of smooth jazz, bouncy funk and Japanese pop. (Love the piano solo halfway through.)
In the video, a young woman goes inside cyberspace — which looks like a giant industrial space full of ominous pipes — and gets pursued by a dark figure with a strange mask. She navigates the cyber-world, which is sort of a weird circuit diagram, and eventually finds her way to a safe friendly virtual "club," where she dances with a friendly guy with ginormous lapels on his white jacket — but the man with the super-huge lapels is actually the dark avatar in disguise! She is pursued once again, but finally defeats the dark avatar with her coding skills. (The screen says "Press return!" and she does so.) At last, the dark avatar is defeated, and he derezzes right in front of her. The safety of cyberspace is once again assured.