Pure Invention
How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
by Matt Alt
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Jun 23 2020 | Archive Date May 30 2023
Crown Publishing | Crown
Talking about this book? Use #PureInvention #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
“A masterful book driven by deep research, new insights, and powerful storytelling.”—W. David Marx, author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style
Japan is the forge of the world’s fantasies: karaoke and the Walkman, manga and anime, Pac-Man and Pokémon, online imageboards and emojis. But as Japan media veteran Matt Alt proves in this brilliant investigation, these novelties did more than entertain. They paved the way for our perplexing modern lives.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Japan seemed to exist in some near future, gliding on the superior technology of Sony and Toyota. Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the “lost decades” of deep recession and social dysfunction. The end of the boom should have plunged Japan into irrelevance, but that’s precisely when its cultural clout soared—when, once again, Japan got to the future a little ahead of the rest of us.
Hello Kitty, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and multimedia empires like Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits. Artfully packaged, dangerously cute, and dizzyingly fun, these products gave us new tools for coping with trying times. They also transformed us as we consumed them—connecting as well as isolating us in new ways, opening vistas of imagination and pathways to revolution. Through the stories of an indelible group of artists, geniuses, and oddballs, Pure Invention reveals how Japan’s pop-media complex remade global culture.
Advance Praise
“From karaoke to manga, emoji to Pokémon, the creations of modern Japanese style have transformed that country and daily life around the world. Pure Invention is a delightful and highly informed view of the people, ideas, and insights behind this pop-cultural revolution.”—James Fallows, author of China Airborne
“Pure Invention is part careful ethnography, part insightful cultural history of the creative men and women who reimagined Japan in the postwar period. Matt Alt tells their backstories and illuminates the impact of their creations, from toy army jeeps stamped out of tin cans in the rubble of World War II to a torrent of anime streamed on Netflix. It’s difficult to imagine a more instructive or entertaining account of a fascinating place, people, and period.”—Stephen Snyder, professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College and translator of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police
“Hello Kitty and Pikachu didn’t just wander into your house by accident. Maybe they snuck in while you were out crooning karaoke with Super Mario? Intriguing and insightful, Pure Invention hands readers a backdoor key to Japan’s culture trend factory, whose offbeat creators remixed and reimagined the world right under our noses.”—Alfred Birnbaum, translator of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
“The rise of Japanese popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is an incredible story. Japan conquered hearts and minds with appealing objects and new sensibilities: kawaii characters, digital cultures, and new forms of personal identities. Alt tells this story with verve and panache, giving a comprehensive overview of Japan’s soft power that is informative, enlightening, and always entertaining.”—Susan Napier, professor of Japanese studies at Tufts University and author of Miyazakiworld
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781984826695 |
| PRICE | $28.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 368 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Adriana G, Reviewer
As a massive and unabashed fan of pretty much all the things that this book talks about, I have to confess that I can't be completely objective about it. However, anyone should be able to agree that Alt really does his homework in researching the history behind the country and the things he writes about. Its information is incredibly well-researched and detailed and presented in such a way that it reads like you're having a conversation with those that lived through it. Which in most cases, you do through Alt interviewing those that experienced it.
It's pretty incredible to see things laid out from point A to point B in such a way that the inevitability of Japan's pop culture spreading in the way it did is so obvious. I guess hindsight is pretty important here and there might be some skewing of facts to help lead the hypothesis to the desired point, but I really do respect Alt for the massive amounts of research that obviously went into this. He's created a timeline of the way that seemingly purely Japanese inventions have saturated the Western world and (at least in the opinion of this Japanophile) made it that much more interesting.
Massive thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the sneak peek!
Readers who liked this book also liked:
Kenny Ruiz, Osama Tezuka
Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga, Sci Fi & Fantasy, Teens & YA
