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Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World by [Matt Alt]

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Matt Alt

Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World Kindle Edition

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The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured—and transformed—the world’s imagination.

“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.

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From the Publisher


The first must-have toy of postwar Japan: a tin jeep from the workshop of Matsuzo Kosuge (photo credit: Otsu City Museum of History)	Shigeichi Negishi with his Sparko Box, one of the first karaoke machines.	Before the Tamagotchi swept the world in the 1990s, it sweptTokyo's premiere tastemakers: Japanese schoolgirls. (Tamagotchi is the property of the Bandai-Namco Corporation)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Fascinating . . . Alt’s choice of interviewees and attention to detail marks Pure Invention as one of the best of its kind. If you’re a curious reader looking for an accessible (and recent!) popular history, I highly recommend this book.”—Crunchyroll

“A kinetic canter through the social history of globalizsed Japanese culture.”—Peter Guest, Mekong Review

“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. 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

“As startlingly original as the inventions that it describes . . . Required reading for Japanophiles, this book reads like your most interesting anthropology textbook, weaving together interviews, anecdotes, and primary source material about some of Japan’s most iconic creations. . . . People often ask me why, as an American, I'm so interested in Japanese culture. This book finally provides me with an answer.”—Lauren Orsini, Forbes

“The rise of Japanese popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is an incredible story. 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

“A masterful exploration of a history, a people and a culture that have shaped our use of technology, our conception of storytelling, and our fascination with Kitties named ‘Hello.’”—The Irish Times

“A brilliant cultural survey . . . Alt’s careful history is a reminder of [Japan’s] spirited creativity.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Deep, engaging . . . A savvy study of Japan’s wide influence in ways both subtle and profound.”—Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Matt Alt is a Tokyo-based writer, translator, and reporter. He is a contributor to The New Yorker online, CNN, Wired, Slate, The Independent, Newsweek Japan, The Japan Times, and many other publications, and is the co-author of six illustrated books about Japan. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Tin Men

In the toy-shops of Japan one may see the microcosm of Japanese life.—William Elliot Griffis, 1876

Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are the prelude to serious ideas.—Charles Eames, 1961

Riding chariots built in Detroit, American conquerors surveyed the nation they had brought to its knees. The devastation wrought by months of firebombing was almost beyond imagination. Prior to the outbreak of war in the Pacific in 1941, Tokyo was the planet’s third-largest city, home to nearly seven million people. Through military conscription, civilian casualties, and mass evacuations, by the fall of 1945 fewer than half remained. The same could be said of the city itself. “Skeletons of railway cars and locomotives remained untouched on the tracks,” wrote the war correspondent Mark Gayn of his first drive into the fallen metropolis. “Streetcars stood where the flames had caught up with them, twisting the metal, snapping the wires overhead, and bending the supporting iron poles as if they were made of wax. Gutted buses and automobiles lay abandoned by the roadside. This was all a man-made desert, ugly and desolate and hazy in the dust that rose from the crushed brick and mortar.” Charred bodies still lay beneath the rubble, filling silent streets with their stench. The only sound of industrial civilization in this grim landscape was the rumble of the American jeep.

The “U.S. Army Truck, ¼-ton, 4×4, Command Reconnaissance,” as it was officially designated, was designed for hauling things around and nothing else. Mass-produced to military specifications by the automakers Willys–Overland and Ford, the jeep offered little in the way of amenities save the promise of near indestructibility. It was boxy, open to the elements, and painful to ride in for any length of time. The drab yet dependable vehicle was somehow down-to-earth and larger-than-life; even the Americans knew it. General Eisenhower went so far as to credit the jeep as one of the four things that won the war for the Allies, right alongside the Douglas C-47 transport plane, the bazooka, and the atomic bomb.

Japan spent the rest of the decade occupied by a foreign military power, literally picking up the pieces of its major cities. Jeeps zipped freely through the streets all the while. For Japanese adults, the jeep stirred complicated feelings of loss and longing—an unavoidable symbol of capitulation and powerlessness. To children, they represented thrillingly loud and fast candy dispensers, dishing out tastes of American culture in the form of Hershey’s bars, Bazooka gum, and Lucky Strike cigarettes. And they did radiate a sort of charm; bug-eyed headlights and a seven-slotted grill evoking a toothy grin, as though the jeep were a cartoon of a car. The iconic nickname, in fact, likely came from a Popeye comic book. The sailorman’s sidekick Eugene the Jeep first appeared in 1936. He emerged as the Pikachu of his era, a fuzzy yellow fantasy creature whose utterances were limited to the monosyllable “jeep”—which sounded a lot like “GP,” as in General Purpose, another designation for the vehicle.

Officially, the occupation lasted until 1952, when much of Japan regained independence under a new constitution authored by American framers. (Okinawa would remain under American control for another two decades.) Even still the jeeps remained, for sovereignty hinged on the adoption of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan, better known as Anpo—an abbreviation of its Japanese name. Grossly inequitable and hugely unpopular among a war-weary citizenry from its very inception, the treaty obligated Japan to host a series of American military bases along its entire length, operating independently and beyond the reach of Japanese law: permanent islands of occupation.

Police were required to salute as the American soldiers roared past, whether they were on official business or driving around with their newfound local girlfriends. The first English words most Japanese kids would master in those postwar years were “hello,” “goodbye,” “give me chocolate,” and “jeep.”

The total destruction of the industrial sector in 1945 obliterated Japan’s manufacturing capabilities—a crippling blow for any nation, but doubly so in one as singularly obsessed with material things as Japan. From the earliest days of contact with the West in 1854, Japan relied on manufactured products to build bridges with the outside world.

The unexpected appearance of an American naval fleet in Japanese waters in the mid-nineteenth century compelled the shogunate to end more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation. The Americans undoubtedly presumed they would find a backward nation with a low standard of living, ripe for exploitation. What they discovered was a vibrant consumer economy that not only met its citizens’ daily needs but delivered books, artwork, furniture, decorations, and fashion accessories to an eager populace. Even in these preindustrial times, Japanese citizens sought out and cherished little luxuries.

Boxes both metaphoric and literal define Japan’s material culture. Artfully arranged bento boxes showcase ingredients and stimulate appetites. The challenging limitations of haiku, just three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, channel creativity into the art of what might be called single-serving verse. So too in the art of wrapping, putting as much effort into the aesthetics of presentation as the object itself, whether it be the careful plating of kaiseki haute cuisine or the presentation of gifts in envelopes or boxes so elaborate that they can rival or even exceed the value of the actual contents.

These packaged pleasures are the products of a hereditary caste system that sorted citizens into boxes of their own: samurai at the top of the social pecking order, followed in turn by farmers, artisans, and merchants at the very bottom. Yet a passion for packaging extends throughout all levels of society, whether in the functional furoshiki cloth wrappings used for daily purchases on the street or in the meticulous packaging seen at luxurious hyakkaten.

Written with the characters for “hundreds of products,” hyakkaten were the traditional analogue of what are now called department stores, or depaato. It is no coincidence that Japan is home to two of the world’s very first and longest-running such establishments: Matsuzakaya, founded in 1611, and Mitsukoshi, whose roots extend back to 1673. With a million residents, Edo, as Tokyo was known prior to 1868, ranked as the world’s most populous city for most of the eighteenth century. For many generations, department stores like Mitsukoshi and its many rivals prided themselves on carrying the choicest wares for discriminating urban customers. Fine kimonos; beautifully wrought housewares, jewelry, and accessories; decadent delights of all kinds, from sweets to toys, all of it wrapped just so and presented with a deep bow from the clerk to the customer—the flourish of the presentation just as important as the contents inside. Packaging was always about something more than protection from the elements; it was an art form in and of itself, a show of respect to object and consumer both.

And what might lurk inside those exquisite boxes? In the late nineteenth century, sophisticated books created from woodblock prints, ceramic ware, fashion accessories, brocades, and other pleasures intended for savvy Japanese consumers so charmed Western artists that they began to question long-held assumptions about aesthetics and design. Impressionists and those inspired by them, such as Degas, Whistler, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, immersed themselves in the playful artwork of Kuniyoshi and Hokusai to free themselves from the strictures of ossified European style. Before long, things Japanese began to transform what it meant to be cultured. Charles Tiffany harnessed Japanese flourishes to elevate a humble stationery emporium into America’s top purveyor of urban sophistication. To familiar luxuries such as combs, servingware, silver, and stained glass, he added exotic motifs inspired by or even copied directly from the work of Hokusai and others: fish, turtles, flowers, butterflies, and insects. Such was the impact of the Western world’s first encounter with the handiwork of the shokunin: Japanese artisans who poured heart and soul into their craft, because their craft was their lot in life, all but ordained by the social order of their era. Taking a cue from the often brutal apprenticeships of the martial arts, shokunin tradition places innovation secondary to the mastering of a chosen medium’s form, finish, and presentation. Only after long years of rote practice might one aspire to making something new. You might call it thinking inside the box. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07YJZYFTS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown (June 23, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 23, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 35489 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 342 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #145,200 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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Matt Alt

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Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in its suburbs, Matt Alt currently lives in Tokyo with his wife and frequent collaborator Hiroko Yoda. Together they run AltJapan Co., Ltd., a localization company that produces the English translations of Japanese entertainment products such as video games, comic books, toys, and literature.

A longtime co-host of the NHK World TV series Japanology Plus, his writing has appeared in publications including the Japan Times, CNNGo, Wired, The Independent, Slate Magazine, Vice, The Economist 1843, and the New Yorker website.

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A fascinating slice of Japan's contributions to pop-culture from WWII to present

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 16, 2021

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Japan has contributed significantly to Western nerd culture, and while many nerds and otaku to this day continue to see the country as a sort of full scale Anime Amusement Park that just happens to be a nation, we (by which I mean, most westerners-- specifically white westerners) don't really take into account the broader historical contexts that framed such innovations, or what they meant for the country that invented them in the first place. And sometimes that can lead to a lack of sufficient appreciation or offensiveness.

PURE INVENTION takes a number of Japanese inventions that ended up migrating over to the U.S., and in this collection of essays, Alt provides that framework. It starts with WWII, when artisans repurposed their shops and factories to contribute to the war effort, and how exporting toys and the like revitalized their sunken economy, and ends with the 2000s and the early days of the internet, when a site of message boards for lonely guys on the internet called 2chan ended up providing the source code for a popular site everyone knows the name of now: 8chan.

The essays are varying degrees of good, although I'll admit I skimmed most of the Walkman chapter because I found it way too technical and boring. I loved the essay on Hello Kitty and the burgeoning kawaii culture among girls with shoujo manga (shout-out to Poe Clan) and pretty stationery and trendy schoolgirls, although the chapter on schoolgirls themselves ended up feeling redundant as a result because it was basically just a remix of the Hello Kitty chapter. I thought it was really interesting to blend Pokemon and kaiju into a single chapter that basically ended up being about the marketability of monsters, and the section about Tamagotchis gave me serious nostalgia vibes (and helped me find this amazing essay, the TAMAGOTCHI DIARY).

There are two anime chapters, old and new. The old chapter talks about Astro/Atom Boy and some of the early dubbings that were renamed in the U.S. (like Speed Racers). It also talks about the pulp anime movement (gekiga) and how that tied into Japanese counterculture/protest culture at the time. The more recent anime chapter is about things like AKIRA, Hayao Miyazaki, and Gundam (of course), which provides a neat segue for the otaku chapter, and how it went from being an incredibly unfavorable term to something that was pretty much heartily embraced and reclaimed by nerds and geeks alike.

The strongest chapter by far is the 2chan/8chan chapter and I think you could honestly make a whole book about that on its own. This chapter is also probably going to be the hardest to read for a lot of people because it highlights some of the big controversies that came from that site, you know the ones. I don't want to say too much about this chapter because I found it so upsetting, but it was also really fascinating and this was the chapter I ended up speeding through the fastest.

Overall, I really, really enjoyed this book. The cover was super cheesy and I'm always a little worried when someone who isn't part of a culture writes a book about a culture, but this author had fantastic credentials (and he's a localizer, which are the people who translate and also adjust references to Japanese products that are being marketed to the U.S.; side note: for many years, I thought doughnuts in Japan were triangular because Pokemon localizers didn't seem to think that kids would be able to understand what onigiri were, so in the original American TV show, they were called "doughnuts"). It's clear Matt Alt has a real passion for Japan and also for geek culture and that is reflected in the writing and his thoroughness in interviewing key planners and providing a substantive bibliography.

On a more personal note, one of my big dreams as a teen nerd was to go to Japan (although I'll admit, I was guilty of thinking it was going to be Anime Amusement Park in my youth). In my twenties, I was finally able to go and I'm glad I went as an adult and not a kid because I'm not sure I could have contained my enthusiasm and approached Japan with the respect it-- and all countries you, as a foreigner travel to-- deserves. It has a very old history, filled with both good and bad things, and even though Alt has mostly showcased the good, some of the items in this book are tarnished by tragedy. Rarely do you see a pop-culture book written with this sort of gravitas, and even though I was expecting a fun, personal romp through some of the author's favorite hobbies, like my sober trip to the country taken in my twenties, my reading of this book ended up feeling so much richer because of that solemnity.

4 out of 5 stars

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scott baxter

I enjoyed the book and recommend it

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 6, 2020

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Overall, I liked Matt Alt's book Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World. I read the book on my kindle and listened to the audiobook version at the same time. The book is listed as having 352 pages, but it seems much shorter because the notes section takes up 25 percent of the book and I skimmed through that notes section rather quickly.

The basic idea of the book is a description of how Japan experienced an incredible economic boom from the end of World War II to 1990 and how exports of popular culture were a big part of this. The story begins with toy manufacturing and, later, transistor radios, followed by such exports as the walkman, video games (Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Sonic the Hedgehog), manga and anime, Hello Kitty (this takes up a surprising amount of space in the book) Haruki Murakami (I wish the book had gone into more detail about him and his books), as well as 4chan and 8chan (which began as 2chan in Japan). I will not provide links to any of the chans because the less you think about them the better off you are.

One of the most important companies in Japan is Sony which, when Alt first describes them in the book, were selling transistor radios. This moment is one of my favorites in the book:

The headline in the January 24, 1958, issue of The New York Times read, "4,000 Tiny Radios Stolen in Queens." ... with [the thieves] disappeared $160,000 worth of transistor radios, the single largest heist of its kind in American history. ...

You'd naturally expect the victims to be outraged, but in fact they ere quietly overjoyed. A series of newspaper articles and radio reports over the next few days repeatedly emphasized the fact that only one company's radios had been stolen, and that company was Sony. The Times coverage practically read like a press release: "The Delmonico Corporation says it is the sole importer and distributor of Sony Radio, built in Japan. Each of the $40 radios is 1 1/4 inches thick, 2 3/4 inches wide, and 4 1/2 inches high. The police said twenty cases of [other brands'] radios left behind, in addition to thousands of dollars of other electronic equipment." You couldn't buy publicity like this! For a few days, at least, Sony was on every New Yorker's lips as the story of the daring break-in and the discriminating thieves' focus on high-tech pocket-sized radios made the rounds. For weeks afterward, businessmen ribbed Sony's representative in New York City for tips on how they might be robbed so successfully themselves. All he could reply was that Sony hadn't planned it this way, and that they were at wit's end trying to ramp up production to replace the four thousand units. Their "pocketable" transistor radios, the world's smallest, were selling -- and in this one case, getting stolen -- faster than Sony could keep up.

Sony, of course later went on to make the Walkman which became the hot item of the early 80s. However, Alt points our that Sony's head thought, at the time, that continuing to sell televisions was the best path forward. In addition, and I did not know this, Sony makes more money selling insurance in Japan than it does in consumer electronics.

Alt demonstrates that two significant macro economic or historical events were essential to understanding Japan's export industry of consumer electronics, and popular culture. The first event was the second World War and the way it decimated Japan's industrial production and forced the country's manufacturing leaders to completely re-think how to do things. The second event was the collapse of Japan's economic bubble in the early 90s that the country has still not recovered from. This economic change had led to vast societal changes like young adults never moving out of their own houses. Alt argues that this stay at home culture has been pivotal in the development of comics, anime, manga, video games, and Internet technology in Japan that later came to the rest of the world. Judge for yourself if this is true or not.

The final chapter is, at least in my opinion, not as good as the rest of the book. It starts with a discussion of what, in English, is called 2Chan, which later morphed into a site called 4chan and, eventually, 8chan. This chapter describes some of the recent events in technology and its relation to the alt-right by discussing Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, Breitbart News, and Gamergate. Alt goes into some detail about all these things, except it never says who Andrew Breitbart was. I had a problem with this chapter for two reasons. First, the rest of the book describes Japan's exports as benign and happy, but the things described in this chapter are neither happy nor benign. Second, I think Andrew Marantz described these issues much better in his book Antisocial:Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.

Aside from the last chapter, I did like this book a lot. It is, at least for me, a quick read, and I learned some things about Japanese culture I did not know before I read it.

22 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Fascinating, educational, and hard to put down!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 7, 2023

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Not just for people who are interested in Japan. This should reach a global audience!

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Kit Robin

A really good condensed history of Japan and it's impact on the west

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 4, 2022

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I'm not really a literary critic, but I've started reading more lately and this was one of the first books I picked up recently because I love Japan and wanted to start learning more about it's history. Rather than going neck deep into really thick text books, I thought this would be a good jumping in point, and I think I was right.

This book not only provided a nice glimpse of Japan's history in the 20th to 21st century, but how it impacted those of us who live in the west. I learned more specifics about how Japan innovated after WW2 and the people behind such innovations.

The only reason I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5 is I felt the last chapter focused a little too much on American politics, which I've already just am so tired of. The entirety of the 2010s seemed to only talk about what was happening in the west, rather than what was happening in Japan at the time. It just felt like reopening scars that I didn't wanna be reminded of, so I didn't enjoy reading that part as much.

Otherwise I still really liked this book, and assuming all the information was accurate, which it seemed like it was well researched, I think it's worth recommending for anyone hoping to just become more educated about Japan, and how we got to where we are now as a society in the west.

2 people found this helpful

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alisa

Japanese pop culture fans will love this book!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 17, 2022

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Matt Alt is your guide to all things Japanese pop culture, and this book gives an excellent overview for aficionados and new fans alike.

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Gianfranco Chicco

An original look into the influence of Japanese pop culture

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 23, 2020

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As a Japanophile, I get my hands on a variety of books related to Japan and Japanese culture. Many of them are simply descriptive or derivative from other work, but Pure Invention offered a refreshing and original read. Alt combines some well known stories (Hello Kitty, Nintendo) with seemingly smaller ones to build a strong narrative on the direct and indirect influence that Japanese pop culture has had all over the world. Even for the better known brands and products, the author unearthed facts and stories that connected the dots in a robust way.

The first few chapters had me buzzing with the vibes that a good thriller offers, and by the end of the book I didn't want it to end. The afterword, written in early 2020, offers insight into how these pop cultural moments will likely influence the world at large for the coming years.

One person found this helpful

Completelybarkin

Great read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 20, 2022

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Great read. Very interesting.

molly stokes

interesting read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 7, 2021

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great read on how japanese influence is taking over the world from anime to gaming! Great illustrations.

Bruno

Great book, but a few glaring limitations

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on October 16, 2020

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For those who grew on japanese pop culture, this is a blast of a book. It's very informative, there's some great inside information, and first account interviews with insiders from the industry. It's written with passion, and the pages flip like the wind. It definetely is a recommendation.

The only thing that started bothering me midway through is that, as much as the subtitle reads "how Japan pop culture conquered the world", it becomes clear at some point that what accounts for "the world", for the author, is actually "the United States." Everything is told in relation to the country, and it's breaking into the USA that is interpreted as "conquering the world."

Now, I know that the USA has a major role in japanese history in the 20th century, due to the occupations forces that are kept in the country since the end of World War II. And I know also that much of this issue within the book is due to the author's own history with the subect that's spread througout the text - this is a work os passion as much as research, which is clear in the text and language, and that is part of what makes it such an engaging read. But at the same time, due to my own experience growing as a middle class boy in Brazil, I know of accounts of japanese pop culture conquering places that diverges and, a lot of times, predates the USA experience. In my own case, there'd be at least two other moments of "fantasy making" straight from Japan that left a strong mark on my obsession with the country - the tokusatsu invasion in kid's and teen's TV shows in late 80's, and the huge phenomenon that were Saint Seiya / Knights of the Zodiac in the mid-90's, that actually opened the doors of mainstream television to anime some three or four years before Pokémon (which was also big here, but essentially seen more as the continuation of a trend than the starter of one).

None of this actually scratches the quality of research found within the book, of course, that is still a very informative and interesting read. It's still a deep and engaging book, that is at its height when it delves deep inside not America, but Japan, and gives firsthand accounts of the developing of technologies and fantasies that are such a core part of globalized cultural experiences today. But this matter of point of view and place of speech that's not entirely recognized (though eventually alluded) througout the text bothered me, because the subtitle in the cover promised a much wider account of the matter.

5 people found this helpful

MARIO NAGANO

Em breve todos serão Otakus!

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on September 11, 2021

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Dá série ""efeito Orloff – eu sou você amanhã!" "Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World" de Matt Alt especula se todo mundo não está virando "japonês" mesmo sem gostar de anime ou mangá.

Isso porque ele analisa como o pop nipônico introduziu elementos culturais que influenciaram o comportamento das pessoas de todo mundo, seja com produtos como o Walkman, hábitos como o Karaokê e até mesmo coisas que só existem no mundo das idéias como o Emoji. 😘

De fato, o que seria do K-Pop ou do manwa se antes não existisse o J-Pop e o mangá?

Matt também levanta outra a bola, afirmando que o Japão não deixa de "ser você amanhã" ou seja, muitos fenômenos sociais negativos e bizarrices que assolaram os nipões nas últimas décadas também podem se repetir no resto do mundo, caso por exemplo da onda de depressão causada pela explosão da bolha e estagnação econômica dos anos 1990 no Japão que, de um certo modo, se repetiu nos EUA durante a crise econômica de 2007-2009.

E se naquela época torciamos o nariz para aqueles otakus (nerds japoneses) que passavam o dia inteiro em casa jogando videogames e assistindo animes no videocassete, o que dizer hoje dos urbanóides que passam o dia inteiro em casa jogando videogames e assistindo séries no Netflix?

Sim amiguinhos, pandemia é um inferno! 😈

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