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Skynet sends a Terminator to Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station to future-freak-out commuters【Photos】

Casey Baseel Oct 30, 2019
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Cyberdyne adapts to local marketing trends.

There are a lot of busy train and subway stations in Japan, but Tokyo’s Shinjuku is the busiest, thanks to a full dozen rail lines that meet up there. That makes Shinjuku Station not only one of the most convenient transport hubs for commuters, but also one of the most desirable locations for advertisers.

In particular, the long, underground walkway called the Metro Promenade is a coveted canvas for creative marketing teams. Previously we’ve seen eye-catching Metro Promenade advertisements from Yu-Gi-Oh! publisher Konami, Dragon Quest developer Square Enix, and anime streamer Netflix, and the latest organization looking to get a promotional boost with passersby is none other than Cyberdyne.

Well, technically it’s possible that the heavy lifting for the design work on the Rev-9 Terminator model was actually handled by Cyberdyne’s Skynet, or a derivative artificial intelligence spun off from the rogue military strike-coordination AI. It won’t be until at least a couple years into the future when we’ll know for sure who should get the principal share of the credit for the time-travelling killer robot’s creation.

Given the timing of the Rev-9’s appearance, at first we thought it might be a Halloween decoration (the original Terminator sort of counts as a horror movie, right?), and when we found out it wasn’t, we felt a twinge of fear that maybe it had been sent to Shinjuku because the baby that was born onboard a Tokyo train last week grows up to be a resistance leader in the war between the machines and humanity, and Skynet has marked the child for early termination. Thankfully that’s not the case either, though, and the Rev-9 is actually a really, really cool-looking movie ad.

Terminator: Dark Fate, retitled Terminator: New Fate for its Japanese release, is set to open in Japan soon, and several of the pillars in the Metro Promenade are now wrapped with posters for the latest instalment in the franchise, in which the Rev-9 fills the role of the new villain Terminator.

Creepily enough, though, the Shinjuku Rev-9 will only be on display until November 3, meaning people in Japan are in store for several tense days when the Rev-9’s whereabouts will be unknown until it shows up again on movie screens when the film makes its Japanese debut on November 8.

We’re feeling especially on edge, seeing as how a lot of our staff walks through Shinjuku Station on their way to SoraNews24 headquarters, so hopefully the autonomous security robot that was being tested in Tokyo last year will be back soon to protect us from Skynet-sent killbots.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]

Follow Casey on Twitter, where the sound of trains rumbling on the tracks often sounds like the Terminator theme to his ears.