Pure Invention

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. During the "economic miracle" of 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 what the Japanese call their "lost decades." The end of the boom times should have plunged Japan into irrelevance. But in Pure Invention, Matt Alt argues that''s precisely when things got interesting--when once again, Japan got to the future a little ahead of the rest of us. Japan made itself rich after the Second World War by selling the world what it needed, in the form of better cars, appliances, and microprocessors. But it conquered hearts through wildly creative pop culture that responded to modern life in new ways. As