#FridayBookReview This time a book I knew I needed to read asap when I learned about (somehow took me quite a while to get around to it though…). With such a profound impact that Japan have had on the global popular culture there should have been libraries already written on this subject—alas, Matt Alt’s “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World” is still only one of the very few books on the topic. All the more reason to grab a copy and dive deep into it!
It is of course clear from the title this is a book about anime, video games, transformers, tamagochi, walkman and the rest of the phenomena that came out of Japan in the 20th century to capture the world (the list reads like a short recap of my childhood too lol). The narrative with the stories about the people who created all these concepts, gadgets and ideas is what makes the book shine. A really well balanced mix of their personal histories and explanatjon of the major historical events and trends that shaped them (the war, 60s student protests, post bubble lost decades, etc.) is probably the only path to understanding such a complex and rich sociocultural topic.
Let me thank the author Matthew Alt for his insights and all the learnings from the book!
*Originally published on LinkedIn here *
Leave a Reply