Rising Sun
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Rising Sun is a 1992 internationally best-selling novel by Michael Crichton about a murder in the Los Angeles headquarters of Nakamoto, a fictional Japanese corporation.
When a young woman is found brutally murdered during the anniversary party and building inauguration of Nakamoto's new Headquarters, The LA force recruits a former captain with knowledge of Japanese culture to aid the detective assigned to the case. However, what initially seemed like the murder of a sex worker on the hands of Yakuza that just happened to happen during a corporate gathering becomes more and more twisted as politicians and Nakamoto's directives are found to be related either to the victim, the murderer, and the real motivations behind the crime...
Although a detective/murder mystery novel at first glance, Rising Sun deals with the controversial subject of Japanese-American relations, and questions the premise that foreign direct investment in the high-technology sectors of the United States is beneficial. Throughout the book, the differences between the Japanese and Western mindsets are highlighted, especially in the areas of business strategy and corporate culture.
It was adapted as a film in 1993, starring Sean Connery, Wesley Snipes, Harvey Keitel, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa.
- Disposable Sex Worker: the murder victim, Cheryl Lynn Austin, was a white woman that was a mistress for Yakuza. The book on which the film was based does humanize her to a great extent: we meet her mother, and the detectives talk to her and learn about Cheryl Lynn's motivations for being in the job she was in.
- Erotic Asphyxiation: It's discovered that the victim, who died from strangulation, liked to be choked during sex, which points out to a rough sex session in an inappropriate location that went wrong. It turns out that she was strangled unconscious by a governor, only for agents of the Mega Corp to finish the job and use the murder to both eliminate their rivals and blackmail the governor.
- Foreign Culture Fetish: The character John Connor spends a good deal of the film pontificating about how noble Japanese culture is.
- Hollywood Nerd: In the film, Tia Carrere plays a video footage analyst who helps the cop characters analyse doctored surveillance footage. The producers simply make her talk in Techno Babble while wearing glasses and an bad updo to try to make her "nerdy"
- I Know Karate: In the film adaptation of Rising Sun, a bouncer warns Sean Connery's character that he's a black belt. Connery takes him out with a throat strike.
- Japanese Honorifics: "Sempai" and "Kohai" are sprinkled liberally throughout the movie.
- Japan Takes Over the World: The novel is the Trope Codifier, at least in America
- Mega Corp: Nakamoto
- Race Lift: Wesley Snipes was cast as Sean Connery's kouhai in the movie adaptation, when his character in the book was a white man. This is noticeable because, especially in the 80s, the Japanese characters were not likely to treat a black man the same as they treat the protagonist of the story..
- Sempai-Kohai: The Relationship between Lieutenant Smith and Captain Connor, even more so in the film.
- Smoking Gun Control: in both the novel and movie the security cameras should make solving the case easy. Except the one video tape of the crucial time and place is missing, and when it's returned, it turns out to have been tampered with.
- The Thirty-Six Stratagems : #13 directly.
- Writer on Board: let's just say Crichton was extremely skeptical of the Japanese integration with America. The film does tone sown this aspect of the novel a bit.
- Yellow Peril: The underlying idea of the novel is "the Japanese are different from us, so their investment is a threat".
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