“ Pure Invention is part careful ethnography, part insightful cultural history of the creative men and women who reimagined Japan in the postwar period. 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 “From karaoke to manga, emoji to Pokémon, the creations of modern Japanese style have transformed that country and daily life around the world. “A kinetic canter through the social history of globalizsed Japanese culture.” -Peter Guest, Mekong Review If you’re a curious reader looking for an accessible (and recent!) popular history, I highly recommend this book.” - Crunchyroll Alt’s choice of interviewees and attention to detail marks Pure Invention as one of the best of its kind. Through the stories of an indelible group of artists, geniuses, and oddballs, Pure Invention reveals how Japan’s pop-media complex remade global culture. 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. Artfully packaged, dangerously cute, and dizzyingly fun, these products gave us new tools for coping with trying times. Hello Kitty, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and multimedia empires like Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits. 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.

Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the “lost decades” of deep recession and social dysfunction. In the 1970s and ’80s, Japan seemed to exist in some near future, gliding on the superior technology of Sony and Toyota. They paved the way for our perplexing modern lives. But as Japan media veteran Matt Alt proves in this brilliant investigation, these novelties did more than entertain. Japan is the forge of the world’s fantasies: karaoke and the Walkman, manga and anime, Pac-Man and Pokémon, online imageboards and emojis. David Marx, author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style “A masterful book driven by deep research, new insights, and powerful storytelling.”-W. The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured-and transformed-the world’s imagination.

Virtual future era forge of empires