In my mind, Yamatai is...
I think it would hold aesthetic very highly and being the main planet of the empire, would be a place that wasn't over-crowded because everything else was over-stretched.
I think... It would seem very serene and sometimes perhaps whimsical - with
huge flats rather than highrises to remove that 'spiked' 'built up' 'busy' aesthetic of cities in place for something more... I won't say eternal but... I suppose timeless.
Any vertical structures would probably be
functional, but at the same beautiful, almost like... They were grown like plants, from glass-like smooth marble concrete structures.
And the residences would be
buildings that blend into the landscape -- though I think the architecture would be a blend of Grecoroman and hints of Japanese - with angled surfaces rather than the smooth rolling forms of greek architecture..
I can see people living in the hills of areas and then the flats in the middle, like craters, being where the people come down to trade and participate in their society - returning to their lofty homes at night.
That there'd be a focus of... Splitting family and private life up very neatly. That you drew your strength from your roots and your work was a crucible for you to be formed, while your family would be a sort of emotional light-house of sorts -- losing the trappings of work-obsession the Japanese themselves have.
In a sense, the mountainsides - while convenient would breathe of a simpler life while the crucible beneath would be
a rich network of capillaries and structures obsessed with neatness.. Almost as if the two are so opposed that they almost seem like completely different nations.
As you go deeper into the crucibles, they'd descend beneath the ground elsewhere - like massive pits - the roof-tops that only seem a few floors high actually being massive highrise structures built almost beneath the ground in these cylindrical or hexagonal pits.
The deeper you go into Yamatai, the more... I suppose
'ultra-modern' it becomes, with multi-layered cities that don't spoil the view of the planet from orbit, while shielding its people and commerce from possible attack.
Each major city would have its PANTHEON - a modest building that serves as a
terminal to some great electronic afterlife and permanent preservation of Yamatai's history -- glued together by a bioengineered self-sufficient internet of micillium, bacterium and organically formed procedurally generated rock formations that act as the planet's memory-banks.
So... While there are
implants of metal beneath the surface of her skin and deep underground, Yamatai is largely an untouched maiden who believes she should look as she was made to - with the exception of lighting at night, looking like a pre-industrial nation from orbit -- to preserve her beauty.
I can see this being a world where the use of fossil fuels like oil, possible products formed with corn (ake everything today), HFCS and many unhealthy products like trans-fats, cigarettes and snack-foods are contraband. This is a place where everything is observed and data is shared and processed by some vastly intelligent hive-mind using everyone's 'spare CPU cycles'.
Thus it would be an incredible commodity to go off the grid or dissappear from these sorts of systems -- to logon not to the internet but the society itself and not be tracked -- would be a privilage and not a right.
Although very serene on the surface, I can see Yamatai being almost a completely different society beneath the surface - changing enormously when entering areas untracked by PANTHEON -- where weapons could be manufactured with 3D printing and the exchange of these commodities massive business.
Even lower down, at the 'core' levels (that is, the frontier, since Yamatai builds down instead of up) I think the culture would possess completely different morals - places only the super-rich can visit where absoloutely no action is off-limits and everything is for their entertainment - micro 'sin cities' to thrive and bolster for tastes both subtle and gross.
Down here, the tables turn:
space is at a premium but personal freedom is not.
The surface sort of like how Singapore has no 'real' culture and everyone is kept in line, believing the party line hook line and sinker - with there literally being nothing to do but shop and eat with the place being spotless and sterile... and yet beneath the surface is a place more like Thailand - with vast economic disparity, where nobody judges anyone on anything and literally anything goes -- ethically agreeable or not, provided you can pony up the cash.
I can see some of Hanako's formulative years being in such a place - and knowledge of its existence a well kept secret to the other nations, since Yamatai gives the impression she is a pure maiden -- but beneath it, the act of keeping that serene surface makes her more aggressive and corrupt than all of the other nations put together - a boiling pot like some lab experiment in social darwinism gone wild.
At least, that's my take.
"Psudo-utopia" indeed.
