Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt , Crown. 4.5/5 stars You can almost hear the teeth gnashing that would have accompanied Nintendo’s decision to release Animal Crossing: New Horizons on March 20, days before the Tokyo Olympic Games were cancelled. But the height of the pandemic was the perfect time to engage gamers around the world. In just 12 days, 11.77 million copies were sold, allowing a captive audience the size of Wuhan’s population to visit the self-built, virtual islands inhabited, as Matt Alt writes, “by bobbleheaded kawaii animal characters”. So it is with Alt’s Pure Invention , a classic in the making that traces the victorious arc of Japan’s pop culture since the 1960s. It feels like the right juncture to be reading about this soft-power triumph, even though the country is no longer ahead of the curve, according to the author. To help us understand why Japanese fantasies were embraced by the rest of the developed world – which has caught up creatively – Alt takes us back to the pioneers, their products and significant periods of innovation. After World War II, he explains, Japan enriched itself by selling the automobiles, appliances and sundries we needed. “But it made itself loved by selling us things we wanted.” In conquering the world, Japan’s pop culture also entered English usage, making permanent fixtures of words such as anime, manga, karaoke and emoji. We are equally at ease with superheroes Ultraman, Sailor Moon and Mighty Atom (Astro Boy to Westerners). Ditto arcade games Space Invaders and Pac-Man, and lest we forget, Tamagotchi, the digital creature that relied on our care to survive. With truckloads of genius on hand, Pure Invention steers us down memory lane, reminding us who we were when, for instance, The Walkman claimed our ears, Totoro our emotions and Pokemon our time and money. Our minds and social habits were also affected. In the “Lost Decades” following the popping of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s, we became acquainted with hikikomori recluses and otaku , “who channelled a generation’s ennui and rage online”. As recession gripped, Japan’s cultural clout grew. Some creations stuck around, or assumed new-found relevance. Take Sanrio’s Hello Kitty , the now 46-year-old mouthless cat that helped breed kawaii – disarming cuteness engineered into so many age- and culture-defying Japanese products. Kitty entered boardrooms in the West on “ostentatiously” displayed notepads, Alt writes, quoting a 2005 Fortune magazine report. And in 2017, when nearly one million American protesters swamped Washington for the Women’s March , they wore “‘pussyhats’ […] sending a sea of tiny pink ears bobbing across the National Mall in solidarity”. In “The Antisocial Network”, Alt points to the influence of the decentralised structure of website 4chan, begun by a teenager to share his love of Japanese comics and TV shows. “Anonymous Internet organisation and the lack of any discernible leadership are also core features of the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement ,” he writes. Hong Kong protest art: meet the student leading the defiant design team Hong Kong protesters borrowed cartoon imagery from the One Piece and Neon Genesis Evangelion TV anime series popular in the 1990s, allowing Alt to draw comparisons with the would-be revolutionaries of 1960s Japan. These rebels were “nourished” by Ashita no Joe ( Tomorrow’s Joe ), a manga parable for the working man battling a social system. Alt is impressive in his depth of knowledge and ability to distil clarity from complexity. As a “localiser”, he has thrown himself into Japan’s pop-cultural arenas, translating into English everything from games to comics to toy-related bumf. His insights are invaluable. Instead of tailoring names and concepts for foreign consumption, he noticed overseas fans demanding authentic fantasies – but not because they wanted things more Japanese. “It was that they were increasingly resembling the Japanese themselves.” Gaps are inevitable. Marine Boy , my childhood crush, is nowhere to be found. More concerning is the lack of discussion about the government’s efforts to market “Cool Japan”. Also absent is mention of Japan’s ideology of uniqueness and its negative role behind the scenes. But there’s much to learn here. Although the future will not be made in Japan, Alt writes, “it will be made everywhere else with values borrowed from Japan”.