Interview with Matt Alt, author of Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
Matt Alt, author of Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World, shares a wide-ranging and fascinating set of recommendations with us this week! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Matt's book:
Review from Book Depository:
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.
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Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
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 multimedia empires like Pokemon 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.
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Book Depository €16.50
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Wordery $18.52
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Daniel J. Boorstin's The Discoverers was my first exposure to big-picture historical narrative writing. His whole "knowledge trilogy" (which includes the sequels The Creators and The Seekers) does a really great job of covering huge swaths of cultural history in an engaging way. These books really laid the groundwork for Harari's Sapiens and other birds-eye-view historical narratives.
Review From Book Depository
An original history of man's greatest adventure: his search to discover the world around him. In the compendious history, Boorstin not only traces man's insatiable need to know, but also the obstacles to discovery and the illusion that knowledge can also put in our way. Covering time, the earth and the seas, nature and society, he gathers and analyzes stories of the man's profound quest to understand his world and the cosmos.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository
By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitious chronicle of the arts that Boorstin delivers with the scope that made his Discoverers a national bestseller.
Even as he tells the stories of such individual creators as Homer, Joyce, Giotto, Picasso, Handel, Wagner, and Virginia Woolf, Boorstin assembles them into a grand mosaic of aesthetic and intellectual invention. In the process he tells us not only how great art (and great architecture and philosophy) is created, but where it comes from and how it has shaped and mirrored societies from Vedic India to the twentieth-century United States.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year From the author of The Discoverers and The Creators, an incomparable history of man's essential questions: "Who are we?" and "Why are we here?" Daniel J. Boorstin, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Americans, introduces us to some of the great pioneering seekers whose faith and thought have for centuries led man's search for meaning. Moses sought truth in God above while Sophocles looked to reason. Thomas More and Machiavelli pursued truth through social change. And in the modern age, Marx and Einstein found meaning in the sciences. In this epic intellectual adventure story, Boorstin follows the great seekers from the heroic age of prophets and philosophers to the present age of skepticism as they grapple with the great questions that have always challenged man.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) A fascinating whirlwind tour of the history of the human species, from cave paintings to the industrial revolution onwards. Provocative concepts delivered with effortless eloquence, well that's how well it reads anyway. (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself
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Book Depository €18.36
Waterstones £16.00
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
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Book Depository €18.62
The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Knowledge Trilogy
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Book Depository €15.20
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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Book Depository €9.25
Waterstones £8.99
Wordery $12.02
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I like Steven Johnson's work a lot, particularly How We Got to Now and Wonderland. He has a knack for spinning cultural histories out of humble, innocuous objects. Having attempted this myself I am in awe of his ability to concisely curate huge, multi-decade or even multi-century histories into compact stories.
Review From Book Depository:
From Steven Johnson, the bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From, comes How We Got to Now, the companion book to his six-part BBC One television series exploring the power and the legacy of great ideas.
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What connects Paleolithic bone flutes to the invention of computer software? Or the Murex sea snail to the death of the great American city? How does the bag of crisps you hold in your hand help tell the story of humanity itself?
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How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World
How did photography bring about social reform? What connects refrigeration to Hollywood? And how did our battle against dirt help create smartphones? In this story of ingenious breakthroughs and unsung heroes, Steven Johnson explores the essential innovations that changed the world and how we live in it.
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Wordery $9.87
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
In Wonderland, his brilliant work on the history of innovation, international bestseller Steven Johnson argues that the pursuit of novelty and wonder has always been a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. He finds that throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.
Johnson's storytelling is just as delightful as the inventions he describes, full of surprising stops along the journey from simple concepts to complex modern systems. He introduces us to the colourful innovators of leisure: the explorers, proprietors, showmen, and artists who changed the trajectory of history with their luxurious wares, exotic meals, taverns, gambling tables, and magic shows.
Johnson compellingly argues that observers of technological and social trends should be looking for clues in novel amusements. You'll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.
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Wordery $11.11
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
I was pretty obsessed with compendiums of real or fantastic knowledge, such as William Poundstone's Big Secrets or Huygen and Poortvliet's Gnomes. I grew up in the pre-internet era, and the idea that forgotten wisdom might be lurking in the pages of a book I found deep in the local library really appealed to me. It still does.
In fiction, I was a pretty voracious reader of sci-fi, everything from young-adult fiction like Pamela Sargent's Earthseed to sprawling epics like Joe Haldeman's The Forever War and many graphic novels, particularly Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira.
The Book That Gives the Inside Story on Hundreds of Secrets of American Life --Big Secrets.
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Over 35 years ago Gnomes was published and the world first became enchanted with the simple, diligent, and magical ways of these special creatures. The title went on to become a New York Times bestseller and has sold over a million copies. Based on Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen's scientific observation of the local gnome population in Holland, Gnomes covers all areas of gnome culture: architecture, education, courtship, medicine, industry, and relationships with other mythical creatures. This revised collector's edition of Gnomes features a new introduction, 8-removable prints in a back cover pocket, and an all-new signature of never-before-published gnome sketches by artist Rien Poortvliet.
(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository:
Ship hurtles through space. Deep within its core, it carries the seed of humankind. Launched by the people of a dying Earth over a century ago, its mission is to find a habitable world for the children - fifteen-year-old Zoheret and her shipmates - whom it has created from its genetic banks. To Zoheret and her shipmates, Ship has been mother, father, and loving teacher, preparing them for their biggest challenge: to survive on their own, on an uninhabited planet, without Ship's protection. Now that day is almost upon them...but are they ready to leave Ship? Ship devises a test. And suddenly, instincts that have been latent for over a hundred years take over. Zoheret watches as friends become strangers - and enemies. Can Zoheret and her companions overcome the biggest obstacle to the survival of the human race - themselves?
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository:
Welcome to Neo-Tokyo, built on the ashes of a Tokyo annihilated by a blast of unknown origin that triggered World War III. The lives of two streetwise teenage friends, Tetsuo and Kaneda, change forever when paranormal abilities begin to waken in Tetsuo, making him a target for a shadowy agency that will stop at nothing to prevent another catastrophe like the one that leveled Tokyo. At the core of the agency's motivation is a raw, all-consuming fear of an unthinkable, monstrous power known only as Akira. Katsuhiro Otomo's stunning science fiction masterpiece is considered by many to be the finest work of graphic fiction ever produced, and Otomo's brilliant animated film version is regarded worldwide as a classic. This edition includes a new foreword from the author and a postscript from Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson!
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Big Secrets
Are there really secret backward messages in rock music, or is somebody nuts? We tested suspect tunes at a recording studio to find out.
What goes on at Freemason initiations? Here's the whole story, including -- yes! -- the electric carpet.
Colonel Sanders boasted that Kentucky Fried Chicken's eleven secret herbs and spices "stand on everybody's shelf." We got a sample of the seasoning mix and sent it to a food chemist for analysis.
Feverish rumor has it that Walt Disney's body was frozen and now lies in a secret cryonic vault somewhere beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean exhibit at Disneyland. Read the certified stranger-than-fiction truth.
Don't bother trying to figure out how Doug Henning, David Copperfield, and Harry Blackstone, Jr., perform their illusions. Big Secrets has complete explanations and diagrams, nothing left to the imagination.
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Abe Books £2.59
Gnomes
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Abe Books £39.73
Earthseed
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Book Depository €12.93
Waterstones £7.99
The Forever War
Review From Waterstones:
Private William Mandella is a reluctant hero in an interstellar war against an unknowable and unconquerable alien enemy. But his greatest test will be when he returns home. Relativity means that for every few months' tour of duty centuries have passed on Earth, isolating the combatants ever more from the world for whose future they are fighting.
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Book Depository €7.69
Waterstones £8.99
Wordery $9.31
Akira, Vol. 1
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Book Depository €17.02
Waterstones £21.00
Wordery $19.10
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
I definitely prefer reading to listening. As to paper versus ebook, it really depends on the title. I love paper first and foremost but it isn't practical when commuting or travelling, so I use a mix. I definitely wouldn't want to be hauling the paper edition of Sapiens around downtown, for example.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
Politics & Prose in Washington, DC. It's my old stomping grounds and I love the way they curate their selection and cater to readers. Here in Tokyo, Kinokuniya's bookstores are always a treat to visit.
Many thanks to Matt for answering my questions and for his wide range of recommendations! Please don't forget to check out his book Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Little, Brown Book Group (Pure Invention), Random House USA Inc (The Discoverers, The Creators, The Seekers), Vintage Publishing (Sapiens), Penguin Books Ltd (How We Got To Now), Pan MacMillan (Wonderland), HarperCollins Publishers Inc (Big Secrets), Abrams (Gnomes), Tor Books (Earthseed), Orion Publishing Co (The Forever War), Kodansha America, Inc (Akira)
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