Thread by @QOrigins

You know what? @Matt_Alt's appearance on QAA gives me an *incredibly* thin excuse to plug his book "Pure Invention," and I'm takin' it.

Alt sets out to answer a question I had never thought to ask: how'd Japan go from exporting, say, *cars* to exporting its *culture*?

https://twitter.com/QanonAnonymous/status/1357205974830878720

This is a very good question! Japan doesn't have THAT many more people than, say, the Philippines (to pick a country purely at random that definitely has never featured in any sort of QAnon-related speculation whatsoever). 😈

And yet Japan has exported the hell out of its culture, whereas Filipino culture, I would say, *has* been exported, but almost exclusively by way of the diaspora.

I mean, I'm not an expert on this, so I welcome corrections if I'm wrong... but assuming I'm right (or right-ish):

why *is* this?

Alt's explanation, which I shouldn't spoil bc you'll want to buy the book, is multifaceted -- and it'd HAVE to be, to get it right!

Some parts read like an economic history, sketching out the sort of... structural forces that led to, e.g., the growth of manga.

And it's not that Alt doesn't *cover* the personalities or companies or milestones that made manga possible -- he does. It's just that none of those would have happened without, for example, the huge population of young, male surplus laborers who *consumed* much of the product...

and whose tastes, at least as much as the creative impulses of artists themselves, drove the art form in different directions.

Alt's discussion of *material* culture is also very strong -- reading through the book one gets a sense of a densely populated, thoroughly urbanized...

society, which of course Japan *is* -- it's famous for it -- but it wasn't inevitable that this would *come across* in a book that could easily have just sort of been a series of disjointed chapters about, say, Japan's production of toy cars in the postwar years, and...

the invention of karaoke machines (not popular with lounge singers, by the way, which is ironic bc it was invented BY a lounge singer), and the advantages that helped Japan dominate the consumer electronics sector, etc.

With SO MANY disparate threads to stitch together...

it would be natural for the seams to show throughout the book. But they hardly do at all; instead it *feels* like a cohesive whole, and only when you stop to talk about what you just learned do you realize: wait a second, whoa, this was a MASTERCLASS in synthesizing information.

Anyway, buy @Matt_Alt's book "Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World."

Or get it at the library.

'cause if you read it you'll learn a bunch of true things, almost all of which are new to you, & isn't that what life is for?

amazon.com/Pure-Invention…