Pure Invention

(by Matt Alt)

In the introduction to this book, Alt explains that it’s about how certain Japanese exports had an outsize global impact— or, as he puts it, how these exports “transformed our tastes, our dreams, and eventually our realities as we incorporated them into our lives.” Each chapter is about a different item or cultural phenomenon, from toy cars made after World War II to anime, karaoke machines, Hello Kitty, the Walkman, and more—video games (and NES and the Game Boy), 2channel (which led to 4chan), and a constellation of trends started by teenage girls, including texting and emoji. I found the structure of the book fairly repetitive, and I’m not sure how much of any of it I’m going to retain, but there were moments I enjoyed, like when Alt talks about his own experiences playing Pac-Man as a kid (and sleeping on Pac-Man bedsheets, eating Pac-Man cereal, etc.) or when he talks about 2channel users “disrupting a Fuji TV-sponsored beach cleanup event” in 2002 by doing their own beach cleanup before the official event, so that when the TV crews arrived there wasn’t any litter to clean. And as someone who was a teenage girl in the late 1990s, I appreciated learning more about the early history of Sanrio and the circumstances that later led to Sanrio stuff being associated with teenagers rather than just little kids. (When I was in high school I definitely had two different Hello Kitty wallets, a Hello Kitty ring watch, and Keroppi playing cards—the latter of which I think I still have somewhere, actually!)