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Everyone perceives Japan in their own unique way. Everyone ‘invents’ their own Japan, as Oscar Wilde said in his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’. In this episode Matt Alt - the author of a brilliant book ‘Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World’ - tells the story behind the unique products such as anime, manga, video games & karaoke.
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Everyone perceives Japan in their own unique way. Everyone ‘invents’ their own Japan, as Oscar Wilde said in his essay ‘The Decay of Lying’. In this episode Matt Alt - the author of a brilliant book ‘Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World’ - tells the story behind the unique products such as anime, manga, video games & karaoke.
Listen to The Rise of Japanese Pop Culture - Matt Alt by Vashik Armenikus MP3 song. The Rise of Japanese Pop Culture - Matt Alt song from Vashik Armenikus is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 57:04. This high-quality MP3 track has 320 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 7 Jun 2023. Stream and download The Rise of Japanese Pop Culture - Matt Alt by Vashik Armenikus for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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the cultural landscape in Japan and its influence on the world changed significantly during those two periods. The first part of the book explores how Japan's cultural products, such as woodblock prints and ceramics, captured the imagination of the West, leading to a fascination with Japanese culture. The second part focuses on the post-war era and the rise of Japan as an economic powerhouse, as well as the challenges and transformations that occurred during the lost decades. By dividing the book into these two parts, the author is able to delve into the different cultural dynamics and influences at play during each period. Arrival of Perry's steamships in Japanese waters hit the Japanese with almost the exact same amount of shock that we would feel if a UFO descended from space and parked over the White House or over downtown London. It was the first Japanese program at a public school in America. And I was like, oh man, wow, really? There's this misunderstanding that Japan is creating these things to kind of take over the world. Almost every popular Japanese product was created first and foremost for the Japanese marketplace. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the RTDOT Podcast. I'm Vasek Armenikas, your host. And my guest today is the author of a book called Pure Invention, How Japan's Pure Invention Was Created. Pure Invention is a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the RTDOT Podcast. I'm Vasek Armenikas, your host. And my guest today is the author of a book called Pure Invention, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World. His name is Matt Ault. He's based in Tokyo. And he kindly agreed to come to my podcast to tell the insightful story of the rise of Japanese popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. I was so excited to find out how Japan's pure invention was created. Pure Invention is a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. 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It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. It's a book about how Japan's pure invention was created. I'm so excited to talk with you because you have such a great book, Pure Invention, that reveals so much about my relationship with Japan and Japanese culture because I grew up with all those small kind of Japanese products or I don't know what to call them exactly, but I wasn't entirely aware that they all come from Japan, although they were very unique Japanese products from Nintendo, Tamagotchi, to Pokemon and Final Fantasy that I used to play and sometimes still revisit it. Could you please give a couple of words about your background? Sure. Thanks. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I always enjoy going on podcasts like this and I'm based in Tokyo. My name is Matt Ault and I run a translation company, what's actually known as a localization company together with my wife, Hiroko Yoda, and we specialize in making the English and sometimes European language versions of Japanese products for export, mainly video games, but also things like manga and like toy packaging, all sorts of things that are Japanese entertainment based. I've been living here for the last 17 years and last year I released my first solo book debut called Pure Invention, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World, which is I believe what we're going to be talking about today. Yes. You start your book with Pure Invention comes from Oscar Wilde's quote about Japanese culture. I think it is from his essay, The Decay of Lying. Can you just give an overview of why Pure Invention? What did Oscar Wilde mean there when he said that? Oscar Wilde was a playwright of Irish ancestry who was quite popular at the turn of the 20th century, late 19th century, early 20th century. That period of time coincided with a period of Western history that's now known as Japanesem, which was this fad for everything Japanese that was coming out of Japan at the time. Japan had only just a few decades earlier in the mid 19th century opened its ports to the world and it was seen as this sort of untouched paradise that was free of a lot of the vices of industrialized civilization. Of course, Japan really rapidly industrialized after that. The reason it wasn't an industrial country is because it was shut off from the outside world, not out of its own desire. But in those early years, it's mainly its exports took the form of all sorts of creative products like woodblock prints or ceramics or, you know, bronzeware or enamelware. And this sparked this huge fad in not only in Europe, America as well, to the point where basically Westerners started fetishizing Japan. They started projecting these values onto Japan that they thought their own societies had lost in the rush towards modernization and industrialization. And Oscar Wilde was this really sharp social critic and like kind of observer. And he knew that this fascination with Japan wasn't really about Japan at all. It was it was really a fascination with ourselves. And so he made he inserted into one of his plays, which later became an essay, this line that there is no country such as Japan. There are no such people. There are nothing more than a pure invention. And of course, he knew full well that Japan was a real country. What he was talking about is that the Japan that Westerners fetishized was their own creation. And I thought it was very interesting because invention in English has so many meanings. It can mean a lie, you know, oh, that's pure invention in the sense of a pure fabrication. But invention, of course, can also mean a physically invented thing, a product, a gadget. And Japan, to me, is a master at kind of synthesizing fantasies into physical reality, making inventions out of pure invention, as it were. And that's what I really wanted to use as the stepping off point for the book, which is all about how Japanese fantasies transformed us as we consume them. As you said, your book is about like how Japanese those fantasies transform us. And I told you before we clicked the record button that there were so many Japanese different products from games to toys that I grew up with, but never realized that they were made in Japan, although they were very unique once you notice, once you realize it. What was your first kind of encounter with Japan, Japanese culture? How did you decide to get to know that culture? Because you grew up in the United States, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, I grew up in the United States on the East Coast in Maryland, a state called Maryland, very near Washington, D.C. And like a lot of people, like most foreign people, my first encounter with Japan came through its products, specifically toys. I was given a toy robot by my grandmother when I was about five or six years old. And it had Japanese writing on the stomach. I was just fascinated both by this toy, which I thought was really cool. It was big. It was about, I'd say, 60 centimeters tall, made of hard plastic. And in Japan, it was from an anime show. But in the West, it was just sold as its own kind of standalone product, just a robot toy. And I loved that thing. And the idea that, you know, I couldn't read the lettering on the stomach. It was written in Japanese. And I remember asking my mother, you know, what is this? You know, and she's like, oh, that's from a country called Japan. That's just how they write. And so that just sparked this fascination with me that somewhere out there was this country making robots like this that I really loved. Like, I've got to meet these people. Like, this is, who are these? What is this country that's making such cool toys like this? Of course, I was only five or six, so I didn't really think about it in those geopolitical terms. But over the years, you know, as I started encountering, I started to realize a lot of the products that I liked came from Japan, you know, like the Nintendo Entertainment System or, you know, the Walkman or all sorts of other things. And I started to kind of connect these threads that there was a kind of shared tastes going on there. Like, these guys were making stuff and gals were making stuff that I liked, you know, and I wasn't alone. A lot of my friends were, of course, avid Nintendo Entertainment System players or Game Boy players or watchers of Japanese cartoons or readers of Japanese comic books, which were just starting to trickle onto the American marketplace in the 1980s. So really, it all started there with Japanese fantasies, Japanese pop cultural fantasies. And several decades later, you're now living in Tokyo. You have a localization company. So the journey was really passionate. And you started learning Japanese language while you were in Maryland. You said in your book, you mentioned that there was the only course of Japanese language in several miles around, and you were just lucky that it was there. What was it like for you to start learning this language that is quite unfamiliar, let's say? It was the first Japanese program at a public school in America. It was just total luck that I happened to live in this school district. And I remember in elementary school and junior high, I had heard that there's a language requirement in high school. And I was like, oh, man, you know, I don't really have any connection to France or Spain or Germany, which are the usual languages in Italian that are taught in American high schools in that era, in Latin. And I just didn't really feel any affinity for those. And so I was really kind of freaked out, like, how am I going to make it through a class like that? And then I learned right before I went into high school that there was a Japanese program there. And I was like, oh, man, wow, really? That's so great. And I signed up, of course, you know, from my freshman year. And I was at that time, this is in the mid-late 1980s, one of a very few number of students taking Japanese because they were interested in pop culture. All of, most of my fellow classmates were taking Japanese because then Japan was this economic tiger that was seen as America and the world's, the Western world's economic rival, kind of like we see China today. And so most of the kids in the class were taking it for that reason. The teacher was teaching it for that reason. And to have me and a couple of my other goofy friends who were like, well, we just want to understand Godzilla in Japanese. We want to read manga, comic books in Japanese, was just something totally alien to our teacher. Of course, she supported anything that, you know, stimulated her children to study. But she came from a different generation. She had learned Japanese during World War II when Japan wasn't just an economic rival. It was a military rival to the West. And so she had a very different experience, background, and lens through which she viewed Japan than I did. And that was interesting. I mean, she was a great teacher and it was a great class and I was very lucky to have it. One of the things that fascinated, fascinates me about Japan, like Japanese history, as you said, like Japan was in its kind of a self-imposed isolation back in the 19th century. The Western countries like encountered China and Japan more or less, maybe at the same time. But like Japan was isolated and started like modernizing with the Commander Perry's arrival, while like China decided, kind of rejected and wanted to stay in its own bubble. Let's say I'm oversimplifying here. I wonder like if you can tell like from the Japanese perspective, when the Commander Perry has arrived, what was it like for the Japanese people? How did they perceive the Western civilization coming? What did they think of and how did it trigger kind of this? I think you can say, and of course, this is coming from my perspective as an American, you know, I'm an expat here. I'm not a Japanese person. And so I wouldn't, you know, want to speak for Japan. But I think you can say that the arrival of Perry's steamships, warships in Japanese waters in 1853 hit the Japanese with almost the exact same amount of shock that we would feel if a UFO like descended from space and parked over, you know, the White House in America or, you know, or over downtown London. It was that much of a shock. The Japanese, I don't know that they were aware of the existence of America, but they certainly weren't aware of the existence of steam powered ships that could make it across the entire Pacific in just a matter of days, a journey that used to take months. It was a literal warp engine of the Victorian era. It shortened distances or the speed, increased speeds of which you could cover distances drastically. And then those ships were bristling with guns of a sort the Japanese had never seen. And the sailors on board those were carrying guns, firearms of a sort the Japanese had never seen. They were still using medieval flintlock rifles imported from the Portuguese, you know, during the in the 16th and 17th centuries and had pretty much stayed in that mode. So it was a huge shock to Japan who, like China and like a lot of nations, thought of itself as the center of the universe. And then suddenly this ship from this like a little this upstart country with only at that point that we really only had less than 100 years of history as America, you know, 1776 is when America was officially declared independence, you know, less than 100 years sails in with this hyper technology and basically compels the Japanese to start trading with it. It was a huge shock to the Japanese and they it caused a huge amount of stress and a huge amount of dramatic, profound, transformative change in Japanese society. But it also compelled them to catch up as quickly as they could. But in those early years, of course, you can't just catch up tomorrow. You know, it takes a long time to build up an industrialized infrastructure. So in those early years, they exported what they could, which are arts and crafts kinds of things. And it's it was those crafts, those woodblock prints, paintings, scroll paintings, books. Japan, Tokyo in particular, had a thriving literary marketplace even before the Americans arrived. These products were Americans, I think, expected to arrive in a nation that was backwards, that they could exploit. And what ended up happening was they found this nation with an extremely sophisticated culture, almost modern in many ways, just lacking the technology, highly literate populace, highly curious populace. And that is, I think, what really sparked the imagination of the West that, wow, these guys are, you know, every bit as sophisticated as we are in a different way. You know, and there was, as I said before, a lot of idealization, a lot of fantastical sorts of misunderstandings about the Japanese. But those products really did trigger a revolution in Western thinking. Like, for instance, the impressionists, you know, Whistler, Degas, Monet, they were deeply influenced by Japanese art. Van Gogh. Van Gogh literally left his homeland and went to France in search of Japanese light. He was looking for Japanese light. He was an obsessive collector of Japanese woodblock prints. He was what you might actually call an otaku today, somebody who is just obsessed with Japanese pop culture, which at the time was woodblock prints and things like that. So, and there's actually paintings of him surrounded by Japanese woodblock prints. So this is that era now leading into where Oscar Wilde is saying that you're just fantasizing about this nation, Japan. You're just consuming its products and imagining what you think it is. You know, there's a real country out there called Japan. And that's that era. That's when all of that was kind of the cultures were beginning to influence one another. I hope you enjoyed listening to my interview with Matt. And before we continue, I wanted to tell you some news. I've launched a YouTube channel a couple of weeks ago. I'm planning to release some of the interviews in video format so you can see how guests respond to the questions. And I think it will add kind of a special atmosphere to this podcast. I'll leave a link in the description to my channel so you can have a look. Those of you who have been following this podcast know that I'm a huge fan of audiobooks and I use Audible to listen to them. And I have a kind of a partnership with Audible that if you'll sign up to it using my link, you'll get free book and also a kind of a 30-day trial that you can check all the features. Thank you once again for following my podcast and sending all the lovely messages. Let's continue with the rest of the episode. It's interesting. The distinction that you mentioned is that, yes, Japan lacked the technology at that time, but when Western steamships arrived, they realized that, yes, technologically West is much forward in its development, but the cultural encounter, you know, noticing those like sophistication of the culture and then admiring it, you divided your book into kind of two parts where you need to kind of two big kind of macro parts. The first one deals with what we discussed early arrival and how the Japanese culture started influencing the Western culture. And the second part is dedicated kind of more to the late one. Can you tell me about why did you decide to structure your book in such way? Well, the main reason is because Japanese post-war history is delineated that way. I mean, you know, after World War II ended in 1945, Japan kind of rose in this meteoric rebuilding of its cities and becoming an economic powerhouse. By the end of the 1960s, it was already the world's second largest economy, which is amazing when you consider it had been bombed into oblivion in so many fire bombings and nuclear bombings just a few decades before. But all of that came crashing to a halt in 1990 when the stock market crashed. It's called, it's a bursting of the economic bubble. And that ushered in what are now known as the lost decades from 1990 to about 2010, were an era of economic stagnation, of all sorts of social problems riddling your heads, a collapse of kind of societal safety nets. And those two periods in Japanese history, that immediate post-war growth phase leading up to 1990 and the post-1990 lost decades, produced very different types of cultural products. And that was the big reason why I wanted to split it into those two parts, because when the bubble burst, economists all over the world basically wrote off Japan. They're like, well, it's not going to be relevant anymore. The Japanese economic experiment failed, so we better start looking to China and other nations. And China, of course, and Korea were rising very rapidly as economic powerhouses in their own right. But the really interesting thing is that Japan didn't become forgotten. It became, if anything, even more influential. The products that it created during that era of economic chaos and political chaos turned out to be some of the ones that we still affect our lives most deeply today. Virtual escapes of video games, you know, online message boards of the type that have really roiled American and European politics over the last few years, in a very real way, the things that Japan invented presaged tools that we would need when our own society started to face similar declines. A lot of Japanese products are essentially tools for broken societies. And now that the West is experiencing, after the Lehman shock of 2008, we entered our own lost decades. We saw the bursting of our own bubble. And that made Japan's tools, its cultural products, even more relevant to us. And that was why I wanted to split the book into two parts like that. And in your first chapter called Tin Man, you tell about the first kind of the toy that was created after the World War II ended. And I really like that the most frequent object on the streets of Japan was the US jeep that was rolling around. And that became the toy for many Japanese and kind of a symbol of an era. Can you tell about how Japan started creating these fantasy worlds right after the end of Second World War? Well, you know, Japan, the jeep is a great story. I mean, I love Japanese toys. As we talked about before, toys were sort of my first introduction into Japan. And I am an avid collector of Japanese antique toys, mainly robot toys from the 70s and 80s. And it turns out that Japan, that Westerners in particular, have been fascinated with Japan's sense of play almost since the first days of contact. Some of the earliest observers, Western observers to arrive in Japan after the ports opened, noted in their diaries and in their writings how many toy stores there were. And not only how many toy stores there were, even out in, not just in the city of Tokyo, but also out in the countryside, there would be many toy stores. And not only were there many toy stores, the toys weren't just being played with by children. They were also being played with by adults. And this was seen as really transgressive behavior by Victorian-era Europeans. Like the idea of a grown man flying a kite or spinning a top or playing games like that was seen as just infantile. I mean, it was literally something that you were not supposed to do as a healthy adult person. But yet, Japan was obviously this up-and-coming, thriving nation. There was nothing wrong with these men and women who were playing with toys. It was just a fundamentally different approach to the concept of play, and the concept of toy making, and who they're for, and what purpose they serve. So I thought it was very fitting to set the first chapter of the book in the earliest days after World War II, which was a very desperate time for Japan. I mean, there's very little in the way of food. The infrastructure has been destroyed. And I think it's very telling that the very first product that went on sale was a toy car. A tin toy car that a man named Matsuzo Kosuge made out of a makeshift assembly line using tin cans that he had bartered with the Americans to get their junk. He basically presented himself as a garbage hauler to take away all the metal because they were having these piles of garbage outside the American occupation military bases. And he took from the nearest base as much tin as he could get, cleaned it, flattened it, and turned it into toys. And to me, when I learned about that, that was so eye-opening. To me, it's so Japanese. It's an intersection of playfulness. It's an intersection of craftsmanship. It's an intersection of kind of the meticulousness because these toys are very detailed. And how these traditional sort of values of Japan came back to support and help them at a really desperate time in their history. And not only help them, they turned out to be a big hit abroad, too. So that was really key. The products that I focused on in the book had to be things that were inessential, which a toy is. And they also had to kind of nourish our imaginations, nourish our inner fantasy worlds. And this scaled-down miniature American Jeep, which by any standard is actually kind of a scary thing. It's the vehicle of the occupying army. By scaling it down into this palm-sized thing, Kosuge basically tamed it and made it this hit product, the first hit product after World War II. And then that jump-started the entire toy industry, and the toy industry, in turn, jump-started the Japanese economy in a lot of ways. Toys were some of the first products the occupation forces allowed to be exported. No doubt because they saw these things like Jeeps and were amused by them. So it's a really interesting web of connections. Yeah, it told me a lot about the way kind of Japanese look at the world when this scary Jeep rolls around in post-war Japan, and they create a toy and play with it. It's just a completely different way of looking at the world. One of the products that Japan created that I'm really scared of is karaoke. I love all the inventions, like anime with Nintendo, everything. But karaoke is a thing that I'm running away mainly because I'm terrified of my voice. I'm really surprised that a product like that could become so widespread. What is the uniqueness? How did a product like that become popular and took off in Japan? Well, karaoke is an interesting invention and one that I really wanted to focus on in the book because it highlights something that a lot of people either forget or misunderstand about Japanese products. There's this misunderstanding that Japan is creating these things to kind of take over the world or to appeal to foreign markets, even to kind of project itself abroad. But that's not the case. Every single hit product that I talk about in the book, and generally speaking even, almost every popular Japanese product was created first and foremost for the Japanese marketplace and hit there, and then only much later was it exported abroad. Karaoke is a case in point because the idea of a singing machine, which is basically what it is, it's an automated singing machine, by all rights, there's no reason why only Japan should have invented this. The electronic components, the tape deck, all of those were of American manufacture. Nations all over the world have citizens who love to sing, public singing competitions, all sorts of things. So why was the karaoke machine invented in Japan? And not only was it invented in Japan, it was invented like five times over the space of the 1960s and early 1970s by different inventors who each sensed a need for this creation and made local hits with it. The reason for that, and this is why I use it in the book, is it was created out of a need for what are known as Japanese salarymen, Japanese businessmen. And Japanese businessmen have a very unique way of entertaining themselves and their clients after work hours. There's a lot of drinking and eating together. And music, especially in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, played a big part in that. Either you would go to a live cabaret show where there's live music playing, or you would go to a place that had a, maybe a lower end place that had a jukebox playing music. But singing and listening to music was always part of those entertainment experiences. And there were professional entertainers who would go around, almost like mariachi of Mexico, playing songs. You pay the money, they play songs. And sometimes they would sing for you, or sometimes they would play just the instrumental so that you could sing. And that was a big business in Japan of the 50s and 60s. And then people started to get the idea of automating that. Because, you know, these professional minstrels can only be in so many places at once. And people, you know, there was just a big need for it. And that's where the first karaoke machines came from. Automating the arc of singing, you know, to a backing track. And it took off among salaried men. And for many, many years, decades even, it was seen as something that only middle-aged salaried men did. It was like, that was seen as the beginning and end of it. And it wasn't until the 1980s that even Japanese realized that this could be popular among younger people. And it wasn't until really the 1990s that it started to be exported abroad. So it's a really interesting example of a Japanese fantasy made for a Japanese fantasy delivery device. It's a device that delivers fantasies. In this case, it delivers the fantasy of you being a rock star or, you know, a singer for the duration of a song. Very slowly developing in Japan and only later going abroad. And that's karaoke, your personal terror, many other people's terror. The guy who invented karaoke, one of the men who invented karaoke, who I interviewed in the book, doesn't like singing karaoke. That was one of the funniest things to me. I mean, he was a tinkerer, an inventor, not a singer. It's incredible. If you think, like, if someone asks, like, who karaoke was invented for, even like in Japan, like the first guess would be perhaps children, because children are less shy than the adults. And here we go. You know, it's a completely different perspective. The other interesting thing about karaoke is because it was such a big business in Japan, it started to promote the development of and accelerate the development of all sorts of peripheral technologies. Like, for instance, the development of new storage mediums. Like, initially, karaoke was all sung on eight-track tapes, then cassette tapes, then it went to laser discs, then it went to CDs and DVDs. And then it went to what's called, in Japanese, communication karaoke, which is streaming karaoke. It was the first music streaming service. It's not Spotify or anything like that. It's karaoke in the early 1990s, and they were streamed over phone lines, digital, and not even samples of the songs. We're not talking digital recordings of the songs. These are MIDI files. That kind of old, plinky, computer-sounding music. Karaoke was the first real streaming music service where you'd pay to get a song and sing it, and it was served up in these karaoke rooms and booths all over Japan. And so a lot of Japanese high-tech development came out of that, too. So it's a really profoundly influential invention for something that a lot of people like to kind of write off as a silly pastime. And that was another thing I wanted to do in the book, is kind of play with expectations. You know, we think, oh, it's karaoke. It's not really, it's this kind of worthless, you know, form of play. But in a sense, we, you know, people who look at it that way are looking at it in the same way that those, now we laugh when we hear about these Western observers who went, you know, to Japan at the turn, you know, in the mid-18th, 19th century, and laughed at the adults playing with toys. We all play with toys now. You know, Japan was ahead of the curve. I assume that the idea of Guitar Hero, maybe you've heard of that. Right, right. Yeah. Essentially, the idea, I think, is exactly like karaoke, but you play guitars or drums, etc. So now when I, my dad who is playing Guitar Hero with me, you know, like a person who would say, like, what are you doing? You know, this is a silly activity. You know, you know, this idea, like, came from the same karaoke idea, you know, like that it makes sense. It's a fun game. It's a fun game. And, you know, you really feel like you're a guitarist, you know, when you're playing Guitar Hero. And that's exactly, karaoke was the first device in any sphere that let amateurs feel like pros. And that experience is something we take for granted now. When you play a video game and you're jumping around like an athlete or like on screen or like able to fight like a, you know, a special forces operative, you know, almost all of our immersive entertainment these days, it takes the form of things that make us feel like professionals in arenas, which we are not, you know, they're escapes, you know. So the karaoke was really in a lot of ways, the first virtual escape, an audio virtual escape. Another thing that I noticed, like about this escapism and like this fantasy world is when somebody asks about Japan, first thing that comes to mind about the pop culture is anime and manga. And all of my friends who are into it are not like just casually interested in it, but they are really obsessed. It's like their identity. Yeah, it's like their identity. It is so much like I have friends who are into Western type of comic books and like art and films. There is this obsession is much less. It's kind of a different with the anime and manga. If you can give us like an idea, like to the people who are unfamiliar, who have heard what is manga and anime and like kind of like their background, how did they emerge after Second World War in Japan? Anime is the Japanese term for animation that's made in Japan, cartoons. And it was coined by a gentleman named Osamu Tezuka, who is the prolific comic book artist and animator who came up with Astro Boy, which was one of the first big international cartoon hits, the first big international cartoon hit from Japan. It debuted in 1963. And manga are comic books. That's the Japanese word for comic book. Now, the interesting thing is, is that while anime and manga emerged as a force in the postwar era, Japan had a really long tradition of illustrated craftsmanship. In fact, we're getting back to the original part of our conversation. We had the things that Victorian Westerners, Victorian era Westerners were obsessed with Japan, took the form of its woodblock prints and its paintings. And the people who saw and collected and appreciated those prints were every bit as obsessive as modern day anime fans or manga collectors. Recall, as I said, that Van Gogh literally lived in a shack whose walls were papered with woodblock prints from Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, all of these classic Japanese artists work. And people would literally surround themselves with these things and use it to form new identities for themselves, just as the impressionists founded a new identity, forged a new artistic identity for themselves from Japanese values. So Japan had this very long history of making appealing, illustrated work. It also had a thriving literary marketplace stretching back hundreds of years. So in those desperate years after World War II, when there isn't much infrastructure, there isn't much ability to manufacture things. But if you have paper and a pen, you can draw things. And so it's perhaps not so surprising that some of the first entertainments to be produced after World War II were cheap comic books. And Japan, it turned out that a lot of these comic books were selling in huge numbers. It formed the basis for a big comic book industry in Japan, first in the form of rental libraries and then in the form of comic book magazines, the forerunners of things like Shonen Jump magazine or Young magazine that are popular, still popular today. And that art form wasn't something that emerged spontaneously. It came out of a long history and a long tradition of respect for illustrated art and illustrated narrative entertainment that had existed for a long time. So what happened was with anime is that Osamu Tezuka, who I talked about before, who made Astro Boy, had to work on a very limited budget. And so the animation that his company produced looked very different from that of Western cartoons. It used a smaller number of frames, which made the motion, there's a lot less motion in it. And so because there's less motion in it, he had to rely on a lot of static poses and a lot of really elaborate character designs and things like that. And those things that would have been perceived as weaknesses by Western observers, Tezuka turned into strengths. And now they are considered some of the hallmarks of Japanese anime, that you have lingering scenes with not so much motion in them or characters striking dramatic poses for effect and things like that. All of those come from the decisions that Tezuka made in the early 1960s when he launched his first anime show. And it turned out to be a huge hit because Japan was experiencing a massive baby boom at the time. There were so many children out there desperate for entertainment. And things like comic books and anime served as that entertainment for that generation of kids who were growing up in a Japan that was still picking up the pieces from a devastating war. Have you got your favorite animes and mangas that you? Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm giving away my age here, but I talk about it quite a bit in the book. But when I was growing up, my favorite anime was a movie called Akira. It's set in 2019 Tokyo on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, which is very strange considering it was drawn in the 1980s. But it's a really amazingly done apocalyptic urban sci-fi epic. And it really moved me, the craftsmanship of it, the immersiveness of it. And, you know, Japan produced a huge amount of science fiction material in the 70s and 80s. And I was always a science fiction obsessed kid. I loved Star Wars. You know, I love Star Trek. I love the Terminator and aliens. But, you know, there was never enough. And so Japanese fantasies like Robotech or all of these giant robot shows that were so popular in places like Italy and France, Goldoraki and many other nations, they filled a need in my life, too, for more and more and more science fiction entertainment. Now tastes have changed. Science fiction is not the dominant form of exported anime so much. But back in the 70s and 80s, when I was growing up, it definitely was. And so, you know, I have a lot of favorites from that period that kind of date me that show like how old I am, because those shows are considered very classic. One of the interesting things that you mentioned, like that there is a difference between the Japanese and the Western comics and is in many differences there are. But like there are you mentioned the act, I think, of a comic book act in the United States in 1954. Yes. And I've never heard about it. And I just after your book, I went and researched it. And that act, you explain perhaps much better than me is it was kind of a code for the comic book writers, which Japan didn't have. Exactly right. I wonder like if that comic book act restricted the Western kind of comic comics that we're used to from Marvel and DC. And do you think like the fact that Japanese comic book writers didn't have that restriction allowed to explore much broader territory? Definitely. Definitely. So a little background for those who don't know, in the 1950s in America, there was a big scare about juvenile delinquency, that kids were turning into criminals. And of course, it was overhyped by the media and by the press and by the politicians. And what ended up happening was that in their desperation to find a cause for this supposed juvenile delinquency, critics pointed their finger at comic books, which were a very popular form of entertainment in America at the time. And the comic book companies were so afraid of being censored by the government that they basically censored themselves. And they enacted this thing called the Comics Code Authority that was really quite draconian. It prohibited almost every tool in the dramatic toolbox. You know, you couldn't show violence. You couldn't show romance. You couldn't show kissing. You couldn't show the triumph of evil over good. You couldn't portray authority figures, such as policemen, in a bad light. And it really reduced a thriving comic book industry in the States into—it compressed it down into a child's medium, basically. It must have been extremely restrictive and frustrating for the artists because there was no shortage of talent in America at that era or any era, really. But with that code in effect, you were really limited in the sorts of stories you could tell. In Japan, there was no such code in effect. And basically, the only determining factor as to whether a comic book succeeded or not was how many copies it sold, which fostered this sort of competition and a flourishing of different genres that aimed at, you know, everybody from boys, girls, sports fans, horror fans, sci-fi fans, social critics, political comics. And by the late 1960s, comic books had emerged as a kind of heartbeat of the student protest movement. The Japanese student protesters of the late 1960s who were protesting the Vietnam War and who were protesting their own government, what they saw as the government's complicity in that war and the issues they saw with their society, they rallied around comic books in the same way in manga. They rallied around Japanese manga in the same way that American student protesters rallied around rock music. So even today, you still get this kind of rebellious, anything goes ethos in the Japanese manga and anime mediums. And I think that's a big key to their success abroad is that not only are they finely crafted pieces of entertainment in many cases, but they also appeal to demographics that traditionally American and British and French comic books don't. They appeal to much broader audiences and much more diverse audiences, which is a good fit for our increasingly, you know, inclusive and diverse Western society. You know, we're recognizing minority groups and trying to empower minority groups in ways they haven't been in the past. And so, you know, Japanese manga, whether intentionally or not, helps appeal to a lot of those groups. And I think that's a huge strength of it. After the burst of the bubble and when the Japanese economy started suffering, what was the reaction of the Japanese culture to that shock, you know, of changing environment, of massive unemployment? How did those mediums change? What was the key shift? How did manga shift? How did technology change? Well, manga in particular and anime were already trending in this direction, but they started more and more manga appealing to older demographics. Teenagers and young adults started to come out. There had already been a thriving marketplace for those things, and this trend started way back in the 70s, but it really accelerated in the 90s, where adults were increasingly refusing to abandon the pleasures of their youth. Why? What was the need? You know, a lot of them couldn't get jobs. A lot of them were in dead-end jobs. The politicians were useless. All sorts of societal problems were happening. So people escaped as best they could. And the tools that they invented for doing this, not only highly refined anime and manga, but new digital tools such as texting. Texting was basically, mobile texting was invented in Japan by schoolgirls who repurposed pocket pagers, if you remember that technology, beepers. They repurposed those into mobile texting devices. And then when the earliest internet-equipped mobile phones came out, they basically pioneered the use of emoji. Emoji, which had been created as graphical elements for mobile websites. Women in particular started to incorporate those graphical elements into their texting speech and basically created this entire new grammar for digital communications. And things like anonymous bulletin boards and anonymous image boards, the forerunners of things like 4chan and 8chan and 8kun, those were created in Japan at the turn of the 20th century by young citizens who were facing problems that the West wouldn't be facing for another 10 to 15 years. And that's why, for instance, now, starting in 2020, when the whole world goes into this horrible pandemic economic downturn, we increasingly follow the playbook that these young Japanese people wrote back in the 1990s. We start hyper-consuming video games. Animal Crossing becomes a huge hit in the middle of a fatal pandemic, selling millions of copies of the Nintendo game. Or retreating into anonymous internet image boards like 4chan and 8chan and places like that. And elaborate digital fantasies, cosplay, all sorts of things that let us kind of forget the troubles of the world around us. And Japan was very ahead of the curve at creating products that anticipated those needs because they were experiencing it before the West. And that was the key thing that I wanted to get across in the book, which is not that Japanese really, in spite of the subtitle of the book, they didn't really conquer us. They got to the future a little ahead of us. And that's why the things they made appealed to us. Not because they were made for us, because they were made for a kind of dystopian future that wouldn't be our experience for a few years to come. But now we're all there and we live in a very Japanese, we're living a very sort of Japanese existence. It is very phenomenal that, you know, if we go back to the beginning of our conversation, that when Western steamships arrived to Japan, the Japanese were fascinated by the technology that was so ahead. And I think like the opposite was with the culture in some sense, is that like that the right now the culture, as you said, like anticipated it 10 or 15 years earlier than in the West, you know, the whole escapism, whole video games and creating those worlds, you know, it's kind of the opposite mirroring thing. Like yin yang coming full circle. It is interesting. You have like, as you said, this is your first solo kind of book, and you have many books written with your wife. Can you tell a little bit of like what kind of books they are? And I know about one, it is about yokai, which are those spiritual creatures. I really would like to read that next. It's something that I was interested in. Can you just give about like your other works a kind of a glimpse? Sure. My wife and collaborator in many creative projects is Hiroko Yoda, and she actually runs the localization company that we co-founded together. And we have authored quite a few books together. Our very first one was called Hello, Please. And it was sort of a survey of Japanese mascots in the early 2000s. And then after that, we wrote a book called Yokai Attack, which we collaborated with a Japanese manga artist. It's a kind of illustrated field guide to monsters from Japanese folklore. That's what yokai are. They're monsters from Japanese fairy tales and folklore. We followed that up with a sequel called Ninja Attack. And then a third one called Yurei Attack, yurei being the Japanese word for ghosts. And these are all guidebooks to help non-Japanese people not only understand the different characters that exist in folklore, the different types of monsters and ghosts and things like that, but also how to survive if you encounter them. They're kind of fun, written in a kind of tongue-in-cheek survival guides. So yeah, Yokai Attack, Ninja Attack, and Yurei Attack. Those are all on sale now. They're still available. And that's how we got our start writing. They're really interesting books. The first that came to mind was the yokai. Towards the end of the interview, I always ask my guests to recommend a couple of books or a piece of music, any forms of art that you would like to share with the listeners. Something that influenced you, that is an integral part of you. Ah, I see what you're saying. Something that's, you know, one book that was actually very influential on me, and it's a pretty recent one. It's called Ame Tora. And it is written by a friend of mine named David Marks. And it explores how Japan, Japanese fashion influenced Western fashion. And I'm not particularly a fashionable person. I don't really follow that world. But it's a really well-written exploration of another way that Japanese fantasies influenced the West. And the way that he tells that story by, you know, tracking down different creators and the different styles that they adopted from the West and then transformed into their own sort of style and retransmitted to the West. Like jeans, for instance. Now Japanese jeans are popular all over the world. America invented jeans. But everybody wants Japanese jeans now because there are better copies of American jeans than the Americans are making. And I love that kind of cultural exchange. And David Marks' Ame Tora was just a really great exploration of that kind of thing. So if you liked Pure Invention, or even if you didn't, I really recommend Ame Tora. I think it's a great book. I hope you enjoyed listening to my interview with Matt Dowd. As I mentioned several times during this interview, this book should be, this book is an essential read for everyone who loves Japan. I wanted also to mention that all the links that Matt has mentioned during this interview to his book recommendations and other works, you can find them on my website, which will be linked in the description. I wanted also to read some of the titles of the books that he co-authored with his wife, Hiroko Yoda. I think titles themselves are so appealing that I really want to go and buy all those books from Amazon in one batch. For example, first book is called Yokai Attack, the Japanese Monster Survival Guide. Or another one is called Ninja Attack, Two Tales of Assassins, Samurai, and Owlclaws. Just the titles themselves trigger my curiosity so much that I think I'll add it to my shopping list. Once again, thank you for listening. You can follow me on Instagram, subscribe to my newsletter, or subscribe to my YouTube channel, which I launched recently. Thank you all, and I'll see you in the next one.
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