Thoughts on Matt Alt's Pure Invention

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.