From architecture to highways and the Olympic stadium, how does reality shape up against Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated dystopia?

It’s 2019 and Tokyo is a sprawling megalopolis preparing for the 2020 Olympics. The city is crowded, fraying at the edges. The young are aimless and underemployed, obsessed with cars and clothes. Cynical new religious movements are on the rise. Motorcycle gangs race at night on the expressways. There is a worrying trend of militarism after years of peace. The government is showing signs of corruption. And everyone seems terrifyingly eager to ignore the lessons of a recent nuclear catastrophe.

The real city of Tokyo and the imagined Neo-Tokyo of the 1988 anime film Akira are nearly indistinguishable. 2019 is the “year of Akira”: the date the apocalyptic science fiction film was set, a couple of decades after a mysterious nuclear-esque disaster had wiped out the original city.