New Book: Pure Invention by Matt Alt

I bought a new book yesterday, Pure Invention by Matt Alt. The book is summarized by the publisher as follows:

The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured--and transformed--the world's imagination, from karaoke and the Walkman to anime and emoji.

Alt published a story in the New Yorker this week about the Sony Walkman that gives an idea of what you might expect in the book. Here's an excerpt:

The initial incarnation of the Walkman, the TPS-L2, was envisioned as a toy for Japanese high-school and college students to use as they studied. (Sharp-eyed fans will recognize the distinctive silver and blue TPS-L2 as the model carried by Peter Quill in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” films.) Sony’s chairman at the time, the genial Akio Morita, was so unsure of the device’s prospects that he ordered a manufacturing run of only thirty thousand, a drop in the bucket compared to such established lines as Trinitron televisions. Initially, he seemed right to be cautious. The Walkman débuted in Japan to near silence. But word quickly spread among the youth of Tokyo about a strange new device that let you carry a soundtrack out of your bedroom, onto commuter trains, and into city streets. Within a year and a half of the appearance of the Walkman, Sony would produce and sell two million of them.

While the Walkman was far smaller and lighter than any tape deck that had come before, it remained stubbornly large. The technology of the day precluded Sony’s engineers, who were renowned as wizards of miniaturization, from whittling their portable stereo down to anything smaller than the size of a paperback book. Oversized for a pocket, the Walkman obligated the user to carry it by hand or sling it in an included belt holster. Even stranger, by current portable-listening standards, were the Walkman’s headphone ports—plural—and a built-in microphone. The Walkman was initially designed to be used in tandem: a “hot line” button paused the music and activated the mic, letting two users chat even with headphones on. This specification had come at the insistence of Morita, who had irritated his wife by not being able to conduct a conversation while testing early prototypes at home.

The canny Morita, the architect of Sony’s sleek image both inside Japan and abroad, was right to fear the isolating nature of the Walkman. What he was wrong about was how, for the Walkman’s growing numbers of users, isolation was the whole point. “With the advent of the Sony Walkman came the end of meeting people,” Susan Blond, a vice-president at CBS Records, told the Washington Post in 1981. “It’s like a drug: You put the Walkman on and you blot out the rest of the world.” It didn’t take long for academics to coin a term for the phenomenon. The musicologist Shuhei Hosokawa called it “the Walkman effect.”

The whole article can be read at

the New Yorker's website.