The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions
that captured-and transformed-the world's imagination. The Walkman. Karaoke. Pikachu. Pac-Man.
Akira. Emoji. We've all fallen in love with one or another of Japan's pop-culture creations
from the techy to the wild to the super-kawaii. But as Japanese media veteran Matt Alt proves
in this brilliant investigation of Tokyo's pop-fantasy complex we don't know the half of it.
Japan's toys gadgets and fantasy worlds didn't merely entertain. They profoundly transformed
the way we live. In the 1970s and '80s Japan seemed to exist in some near future soaring on
the superior technology of Sony and Toyota while the West struggled to catch up. Then a
catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the lost decades of deep recession and social
dysfunction. The end of the boom times 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 entertainment
empires like Pokâemon and Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits. Artfully packaged
dangerously cute and dizzyingly fun these products made Japan the forge of the world's
fantasies and 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 Japanese ingenuity remade global culture and may have
created modern life as we know it. It's Japan's world we're just gaming texting singing and
dreaming in it--
