A race of totally evil cyber zombies, the Borg cruise in spaceships that resemble big black cubes or dense solid spheres, and look to evolve by absorbing new individual races. What makes them so terrifying is their superior technology and collective will. You will be assimilated. As the distillation, in its purest form, of all the orientalist stereotypes of Japan, the Borg provide us with an early-warning signal of another approaching cold war. The Borg are the American fear of Japan writ large.
Japan occupies a special place in the lore of orientalism.
Like the rest of the orient, it has been seen as an exotic culture, the land of karate and the geisha. But Japan also differs from much of the orient in two distinct ways. First, it was never colonised. So Japan was able to protect itself from the onslaught of the orientalist scholars. The histories of all oriental civilisations have been written by western scholars in a framework that makes them small tributaries in the great universal river of western history.