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PURE INVENTION: HOW JAPAN'S POP CULTURE CONQUERED THE WORLD

Matt Alt



 

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.

 

PUBLICATION DETAILS

LANGUAGE

BINDING

EDITION

ISBN

YEAR

PAGES

English

Paperback

9781984826718

2021

368

English

Hardcover

9781984826695

2020

368

PUBLICATION DETAILS

LANGUAGE

LENGTH

VERSION

NARRATORS

YEAR

English

12 hours

Unabridged

Matt Alt

2020

OTHER NAMES

  • PURE INVENTION: HOW JAPAN MADE THE MODERN WORLD

 

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Authors/Narrators: #MattAlt

Publishers: #Crown (Crown)

Languages: #English


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