Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World

The book "Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World" explores how Japan's pop-culture creations have profoundly transformed the way we live, from toys to gadgets to fantasy worlds. It reveals how Japan's ingenuity remade global culture and may have created modern life as we know it, through the stories of artists, geniuses, and oddballs.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 08 July 2021
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Amazingly well researched, fabulously informative, and an awful lot of fun. If you love Japanese culture or are just curious to know more, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Jonathan Ross

A nerd- and generalist-friendly look at how Japan shaped the post-World War II world, from toys to Trump.

A non-native's savvy study of Japan's wide influence in ways both subtle and profound.

Kirkus

The Walkman. Karaoke. Pikachu. Pac-Man. Akira. Emoji. We've all fallen in love with one or another of Japan's pop-culture creations, from the techy to the wild to the super-kawaii. But as Japanese-media veteran Matt Alt proves in this brilliant investigation of Tokyo's pop-fantasy complex, we don't know the half of it.

Japan's toys, gadgets, and fantasy worlds didn't merely entertain. They profoundly transformed the way we live.

In the 1970s and 80s, Japan seemed to exist in some near future, soaring on the superior technology of Sony and Toyota while the West struggled to catch up.

Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the lost decades of deep recession and social dysfunction.

The end of the boom times 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 Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits.

Artfully packaged, dangerously cute, and dizzyingly fun, these products made Japan the forge of the world's fantasies, and 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 otaku, fashion designers, and tech entrepreneurs, Alt reveals the surprising ways in which Japan's pop-culture obsession has influenced everything from politics to popular music.

Japan's pop-culture complex is a fascinating and complex world that deserves to be explored more fully.

Whether you're a fan of Japanese culture or just curious about the world's most innovative nation, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, creativity, and culture.

Weight: 290g
Dimension: 127 x 198 x 214 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781472131850