From the (e)Bookshelf: Pure Invention
Jul. 10th, 2020 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI happened to see notices of a book by Japan-based translator Matt Alt named Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World well in advance of its publication date. Blurbs that brought up “Japan was once seen as an incipient technological superpower, but even after its bubble burst it managed to start making its charming cultural fripperies acknowledged around the world” did get my attention; I thought a bit of Bending Adversity for all that David Pilling’s earlier book had brushed off in a breath the “pop culture” this later book appeared to be focusing on. When Pure Invention was at last available, I bought an ebook version.
After revealing the title had been drawn from an Oscar Wilde quote back when “end-of-the-century fascination with that foreign land Japan” had meant the end of the nineteenth century, the introduction made a big point of Final Fantasy VII, which was a bit of a surprise to me. As the book noted, the heavy promotion of that PlayStation game registered on me too in the late 1990s; I suppose it did also feature among the “anime MSTings” I was starting to read at the time. However, for all that I have to accept this “openly from-Japan product” was in advance of “anime getting back beyond a VHS subculture in North America, but in such a way those people were no longer as swift to find condemnable compromises in spreading it” and doubtless reaching a wider audience (for all I have continued suspicions about “the promotion of videogames” being a bit full of itself), it was still something I never quite experienced myself, already settled on “doing without videogame consoles” (and, perhaps just as important, in a university residence where everyone else seemed to play games on their generic PC boxes.) Alt drew a distinction between pop culture and more neutral, useful objects such as cars and VCRs, a distinction from Andrew McKevitt’s Consuming Japan.
While the blurbs had left me supposing the book would really pick up in the 1990s, I was a bit surprised again that its narrative began in the aftermath of World War II, with a “tin toy” firm reconstituting itself using discarded cans as material and American Jeeps as templates. With a bit of thought, though, I was able to see this as an earlier wave of “rescue and reconstruction through pop culture” decades in advance of the one I’d been expecting. While I’m also aware other histories with different focuses place their own emphasis on “the demands of the Korean War” as sparking Japan’s industrial reconstruction, this book did point out public protests over Japan’s reshaping itself as feeding ideas and cultural refugees of a sort into the evolution of manga and the compromised beginnings of the anime industry.
Not “a translator” myself and therefore stuck relying on the efforts of others, I suppose I started thinking this book offered more emphasis on narratives inside Japan than a few other works I’ve read that have might been a little easy to imagine as taking products from some mysterious source and dealing most of all with how English-speaking people reacted to them. If there’s a flip side to that, though, I did notice how a chapter on Hello Kitty and “the rise of kawaii” talked about the worldwide iconography of Peanuts and Snoopy in particular, but tossed in comments how “once upon a time people talked up the cruelties of its characters to each other; now, with all that merchandising...” I suppose I want to push back against “blanket dismissals of the Peanuts comics I was alive for,” but I’m aware there’s at least a bit of irrational compulsion there. There was another cameo appearance in a chapter about the Sony Walkman when the young Steve Jobs showed up on his worst behaviour as Apple tried to find a better floppy disk drive for the original Macintosh; however, an anecdote I’ve heard how an older Jobs had to be talked down from naming a computer “Macman” before it could wind up the first iMac didn’t get included here.
After that chapter the bubble did burst and pop culture became more important; the book continued to be a not exactly linear narrative in moving “from anime to otaku” through the original Mobile Suit Gundam (with at least a brief note trying to draw distinctions between “its dedicated fans saved it” and “Star Trek’s dedicated fans preserved it a decade before.”) A chapter on Pokemon as a turn-of-the-millennium crystallization of “video games and less interactive narratives” reaching a wide English-speaking audience also reached back to the kaiju monsters of Ultraman, something I’m aware of not having the same interest as others in.
For all its lightweight charms and interest, the book did take a dark turn in its last chapter, when a Japanese online message board (connected to a mild, late bit of “cyber-utopianism,” the possibly-true hookup story Train Man) inspired an American knockoff that did discuss anime to start with but veered into the performative offensiveness of “Gamergate” and “the alt-right” (and from there to still more noisome obsessions Alt didn’t deal with). These signs of a culture not adapting weren’t pleasant things to be associated with; the defenses of 1950s comics that tried to argue “sure, juvenile delinquents read comics, but so did every other American child” can only carry so far. A comment written into the conclusion I’d already been aware of about “seeking diversion during protective isolation” wound up much less troubling in comparison. Still, there was also a comment about African Americans finding their own inspiration in Dragon Ball (a franchise I’m old enough to never quite have been interested in, for all that I suppose that’s a hole in my awareness of some significant size), which pushed back in a useful way against occasional worries about “drawn in such a way as to widen appeal, but coloured in such a way as to limit that,” which do have to be examined and questioned in turn.
After revealing the title had been drawn from an Oscar Wilde quote back when “end-of-the-century fascination with that foreign land Japan” had meant the end of the nineteenth century, the introduction made a big point of Final Fantasy VII, which was a bit of a surprise to me. As the book noted, the heavy promotion of that PlayStation game registered on me too in the late 1990s; I suppose it did also feature among the “anime MSTings” I was starting to read at the time. However, for all that I have to accept this “openly from-Japan product” was in advance of “anime getting back beyond a VHS subculture in North America, but in such a way those people were no longer as swift to find condemnable compromises in spreading it” and doubtless reaching a wider audience (for all I have continued suspicions about “the promotion of videogames” being a bit full of itself), it was still something I never quite experienced myself, already settled on “doing without videogame consoles” (and, perhaps just as important, in a university residence where everyone else seemed to play games on their generic PC boxes.) Alt drew a distinction between pop culture and more neutral, useful objects such as cars and VCRs, a distinction from Andrew McKevitt’s Consuming Japan.
While the blurbs had left me supposing the book would really pick up in the 1990s, I was a bit surprised again that its narrative began in the aftermath of World War II, with a “tin toy” firm reconstituting itself using discarded cans as material and American Jeeps as templates. With a bit of thought, though, I was able to see this as an earlier wave of “rescue and reconstruction through pop culture” decades in advance of the one I’d been expecting. While I’m also aware other histories with different focuses place their own emphasis on “the demands of the Korean War” as sparking Japan’s industrial reconstruction, this book did point out public protests over Japan’s reshaping itself as feeding ideas and cultural refugees of a sort into the evolution of manga and the compromised beginnings of the anime industry.
Not “a translator” myself and therefore stuck relying on the efforts of others, I suppose I started thinking this book offered more emphasis on narratives inside Japan than a few other works I’ve read that have might been a little easy to imagine as taking products from some mysterious source and dealing most of all with how English-speaking people reacted to them. If there’s a flip side to that, though, I did notice how a chapter on Hello Kitty and “the rise of kawaii” talked about the worldwide iconography of Peanuts and Snoopy in particular, but tossed in comments how “once upon a time people talked up the cruelties of its characters to each other; now, with all that merchandising...” I suppose I want to push back against “blanket dismissals of the Peanuts comics I was alive for,” but I’m aware there’s at least a bit of irrational compulsion there. There was another cameo appearance in a chapter about the Sony Walkman when the young Steve Jobs showed up on his worst behaviour as Apple tried to find a better floppy disk drive for the original Macintosh; however, an anecdote I’ve heard how an older Jobs had to be talked down from naming a computer “Macman” before it could wind up the first iMac didn’t get included here.
After that chapter the bubble did burst and pop culture became more important; the book continued to be a not exactly linear narrative in moving “from anime to otaku” through the original Mobile Suit Gundam (with at least a brief note trying to draw distinctions between “its dedicated fans saved it” and “Star Trek’s dedicated fans preserved it a decade before.”) A chapter on Pokemon as a turn-of-the-millennium crystallization of “video games and less interactive narratives” reaching a wide English-speaking audience also reached back to the kaiju monsters of Ultraman, something I’m aware of not having the same interest as others in.
For all its lightweight charms and interest, the book did take a dark turn in its last chapter, when a Japanese online message board (connected to a mild, late bit of “cyber-utopianism,” the possibly-true hookup story Train Man) inspired an American knockoff that did discuss anime to start with but veered into the performative offensiveness of “Gamergate” and “the alt-right” (and from there to still more noisome obsessions Alt didn’t deal with). These signs of a culture not adapting weren’t pleasant things to be associated with; the defenses of 1950s comics that tried to argue “sure, juvenile delinquents read comics, but so did every other American child” can only carry so far. A comment written into the conclusion I’d already been aware of about “seeking diversion during protective isolation” wound up much less troubling in comparison. Still, there was also a comment about African Americans finding their own inspiration in Dragon Ball (a franchise I’m old enough to never quite have been interested in, for all that I suppose that’s a hole in my awareness of some significant size), which pushed back in a useful way against occasional worries about “drawn in such a way as to widen appeal, but coloured in such a way as to limit that,” which do have to be examined and questioned in turn.