Imagineering the Future: A Mixed-Method Mapping of Japan’s Corporate Imaginaries of Metaverse Sustainability

Japanese metaverse discourse relies heavily on collective, often prescriptive visions of technoscientific futures. In general, these hyperbolic visions might be similar across the globe, but what about aspects they deliberately gloss over? Driven by this question, I examine Japan’s corporate metaverse discourse, focusing on the rarely thematized aspects of environmental and social sustainability. Based on Jasanoff’s concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, Adloff’s imaginaries of sustainability, and Brause et al.’s SIPC framework, my mixed-method approach identifies metaverse imaginaries through a combination of digital corpora analysis and semi-structured interviews with 14 expert practitioners from Japan. As a result, five sociotechnical imaginaries of sustainability emerge within Japan’s corporate metaverse discourse: anticipation, digital revolution, pragmatism, cultural essentialism, and technosolutionism. My analysis shows that the answers a nascent metaverse is expected to provide with regard to ecological and social crises depend on the type of metaverse we imagine and its relationship with the real world. The findings suggest that Japan’s imaginaries of metaverse sustainability are uniquely situated between an essentialized past, a challenging present, and distant futures, as well as between Japanese particularities and global tech ideologies.