Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 321: Pure Invention—Video Games & 20th Century Japan

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

Matt Alt, author of Pure Invention, joins Jeremy to discuss his research into the impact of technological innovation on the growth of Japanese society in the 20th century, and how it shaped video gaming. Cover art by Nick Wanserski.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This weekend, Retronauts, Konichiwa, kids. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. This is a flying solo kind of episode, but not entirely solo. I mean, I'm just, it's me, no Bob Mackie, just a one-on-one conversation with someone on the other side of the planet, you know, doing the whole pandemic thing. But this is a, I think we'll be a great conversation. built around a book that just recently came out and is one that, you know, I picked up and

pretty much couldn't put down. It was just a very, very interesting treatise on the history of Japanese pop culture over the past 60 or 70 years and really interesting stuff. So I will let my guest this week introduce himself and tell us a little bit about, you know, kind of your career and what is what brought you to the point of writing this, this book. Sure. Well, I'm Matt Alt. Thanks for having me on. I'm the author of quite a few books about Japan, but most recently, Pure Invention, how Japan's pop culture conquered the world. And I have been interested in Japan for a very long time.

I'm probably like you and a lot of your listeners, somebody who was kind of fascinated by Japanese things ever since I was a kid. In my particular case, I was born in the early 70s, so it was initially mainly toys, robot toys and things like that, Shogun Warriors, Transformers, Go Deikins, all of these kind of Japanese robot fantasies that were on television and populating toy store shelves when I was a kid. But that quickly gave way to all sorts of more complicated things, like, for instance, when the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, that was a huge revelation to me and my friends that you could have this kind of gaming experience in your house.

and that it was from Japan, of course. And, you know, over the years, the Game Boy, all sorts of these things started coming out. And it was really obvious to me that there was some kind of strange synchronization going on between the tastes of not just me, but like all of Americans, because these products were huge hits

and the Japanese who were making them. And, you know, that just kind of percolated in the back of my mind for many years. And I went on, you know, I graduated from school. I became a translator. I co-founded a localization company together with my wife, Hiroko Yoda. It's called Alt Japan. And starting in 2003 in Tokyo, we moved here and we've been working on games, manga, toys,

all sorts of cool Japanese products and helping Japanese creators get their products into English and European-speaking markets ever since. And writing has always been a sort of side gig or a hobby. for me. But with this book, it really took off and became a sort of new direction of its own. Yeah. So how would, how would you describe kind of the elevator pitch of pure invention? It's, as a book, it's kind of all over the place. Like, there is a chronology to it. But, I mean, it starts with, you know, basically World War II or even kind of before that and kind of sets the groundwork. And it ends with, you know, the 2016 presidential elections. And, you know, it covers

a lot of ground is what I'm saying. Right. Well, you know, the book centers on a concept that I call fantasy delivery devices. And what these are are products that aren't just hits, but they actually transformed the way that we thought and the way we lived our lives and also the way we looked at Japan. So, for instance, something like a Honda Civic, although it's a huge hit product, isn't really a fantasy delivery device because we purchased those cars because they were well-made and cheaper than American models, not because we were in love. with the concept of them being Japanese or Japan at all. Now, if you look at something like the Walkman, for instance,

that's a primo fantasy delivery device. That is something that literally transformed the way, not only that we looked at Japan, wow, this country is capable of making these tiny, cool electronic devices. It also fundamentally profoundly transformed the way we live by letting us take music into our daily lives. So that's the kind of concept that I based the book on, and I selected a series of key fantasy delivery,

devices to use to tell a narrative story, not only about Japan's rise as a fantasy superpower, but also about how all of our tastes all over the world gradually started synchronizing with those of Japan. And one of the really key things that I picked up when I was researching and writing the book was that the products that I choose, things like the Famicom or the Nintendo Entertainment System, for instance, or Hello Kitty products, or the Walkman, like I mentioned, or the karaoke machine. These things didn't hit just because they were well-made products, even though they were. They also hit because, in many ways, Japan as a society, kind of got to a point that all advanced societies, Western societies, would get to a little bit ahead of the curve.

So for us in the 80s and 90s, consuming things like the Game Boy or karaoke or whatever, these seemed like kind of missives from the future. But then as Japan and our society started to resemble one another more and more, these things became kind of necessities. So like, for instance, Japan went through this big economic crash in 1990. Well, the West went through its own Lehman shot crash in 2008, 18 years later. By that point, Japan was a master at dealing with all sorts of the problems that come with living in this kind of permanent economic recession. And so that's why we started consuming things even more. we started to resemble them even more. And that's why these products really wormed their way

into our hearts and minds. So Pure Invention is a history. It's a history of Japan, but it's also a history of how all of us, all around the world, got to now. Yeah, and you, you know, you draw some really interesting connections. in the book. And one of the first things

that you really focus on are tin toys that were created in the wake of World War II as one of the first sort of industrial entertainment products that came out of Japan as it was starting to rebuild itself

after just the absolute devastation that was wrought on the country, on its economy, on its infrastructure, on its cities, on its citizens. And then, you know, later in the book, you picked that up by,

I believe, mentioning that Masayuki Uemura, the designer of the NES, Like, that was one of the first toys he remembered owning. Yeah, you know, in my mind, and I think in a lot of people's mind, there's this kind of image that up to World War II, Japan was this feudalistic, militaristic place. And then after World War II, after it lost in the war, it kind of developed into this hyper-consumer economy that made things like Hello Kitty

and karaoke machines and video games. But what I learned when I was researching the book is that actually the toy industry was super key to Japan's growth even back like in the 19th century. And like in the early 20th century, there were all sorts of like trade friction issues between American and European toy makers who were like really pissed off that Japanese toy companies were selling things on the foreign marketplace much cheaper than domestic producers could provide. So toys have like always been kind of this heartbeat of the of the Japanese experience, so to speak. And I think it's really fitting that right after World War II, when there's literally nothing, like we had bombed every single city into cinders with the exception of Kyoto, there's literally nothing.

And the first manufactured product to come out of those ruins is a toy, a toy jeep, modeled after the American jeeps that were driving around on the streets from the Occupation Army and actually made out of tin that was scavenged from American dumps outside of the bases. So it's this really complicated, you know, emotionally complex and a kind of sad and devastating, in a way product that became Japan's first big hit after World War II. And I think that kind of sense of play, even in the face of apocalypse, is really key to why Japanese creators are so successful around the world. Yeah, I mean, even though you don't really bring it up that I can recall in the book, like reading those chapters about sort of the, you know, the reestablishment of, you know, what Japan had lost after the war really brought to my engrave of the fireflies and, you know,

other media works that just really focus on the deep sadness and the loss that just permeated that entire country for so long. And, you know, just shaped an entire. entire generation's view of the world and kind of what they could expect. And when you kind of look back and see just how much destruction was inflicted on the country and really what the country was before that, because as you say, it wasn't, you know, like samurai walking around and, you know, squatting in dirt huts or whatever. It was a very, you know, advanced country. It was very industrialized. It was very progressive in a lot of ways. And, you know, it had lots of entertainment

industries and, you know, obviously you had Nintendo starting in the 19th century making playing cards. Like that whole, you know, sense of play was really just integral to and pastimes and relaxation. Like Japan elevates, has elevated those things to an art form and to take so much of that away and then kind of claw, you know, they had to kind of claw their way back onto the world stage. Yeah, it's just, it's remarkable how quickly the country managed to do that collectively. I don't know if you've played Attack of the Friday Monsters on Nintendo PBS. No,

it happened. What is this? What is this? So it's a, it's not like an action game really. It's kind of like a, almost like a visual novel, but not really. But you play as a little kid in living kind of on the outskirts of Tokyo in the late 60s. And, you know, he's having like these fantasies of basically kaiju attacking the city and that sort of thing. Right. But it's all set against the backdrop of

Tokyo in the distance. like, you know, the skyline is very simple to what it is now, but you start to see sort of the outline of some familiar shapes in Shinjuku, basically, the sort of central area of Tokyo. And, you know, as I feel like as an outsider who didn't grow up in Japan, obviously, and it mostly knows it from what it was in the 80s and beyond, it's really fascinating to kind of look back, you know, to kind of experience that lost history between, you know, 1945 and 19, you know, 70 or, you know, with the Olympics and the advent of Sony radios and things like that.

And just, I don't know, just how quickly everyone sort of focused and, you know, turn things around. Like, we all agree that like, you know, the Nintendo entertainment system or, you know, the Super Nintendo or the Genesis or these things that really shaped our sensibilities as young people were key products. But I don't really think you can understand them taken out of the context. of where they were invented and created. And, you know, a really interesting example of this, I think, is Pokemon. Perhaps you've heard of it.

It's a video game from Japan and card game series. But Pokemon was invented by a guy, as I'm sure you know, named Satoshi Tajiri. And there's a really famous anecdote where he is, when he's a really little kid, he's growing up in Machida, which is a kind of suburb of Tokyo, maybe about 45 minutes away from downtown by train. And when he was growing up in the late 60s and early 70s, it was very green. You know, there was a lot of nature around, and he would run around and collect bugs and frogs and tadpoles and things like that, as kids do. But then one day, you know, he showed up on his favorite fishing hole had been paved over, and a couple weeks after that, a video game arcade went up on that spot.

And he got hooked on space invaders, and he immediately switched from being interested in the outdoors and these real-life animals. and things like that, traditional forms of play, into this immersive new form of play. And, you know, at the time, adults were pointing fingers at, you know, grown-ups authorities. Video games are bad. Video games are destroying children's, you know, ability to imagine things.

But nobody was looking at the fact that it was the adults who were paving over all of the places that kids traditionally played outside. And Tijiri is really, you know, up front about this. He's like, I didn't have any place else to play, so I kind of threw myself into video games. That's not a societal problem. That's certainly not the kids' problem.

That is coming from this broader issue going on in society at large. And through that experience is how he created Pokemon. He kind of brought that outdoorsy, hunting for bugs and animals, exploration, back indoors in the form of the Game Boy, you know, in that kind of virtual construct that were the original Pokemon games. And that, when Pokemon hit in the West, people were just blown away. Like, what is this? They thought it came out of nowhere.

Well, it didn't come out of nowhere. Like, Japanese people, like Satoshi Tajiri didn't just dream this up off the top of his head. Like, it came out of this long and often sometimes sad experience that he'd had growing up in a Japan that was industrializing faster than anybody could have imagined. Yeah, it's difficult for, I think, modern Americans to relate to that because, well, there's a few reasons. And one of those is the country is pretty well developed at this point and pretty well defined into, like, you've got your farmland here and you've got your city space here and you've got your city space here and you've got your small towns, but, you know, I think also just America is so, has so much more space. Yeah, America's big. So when we need to develop, there are many opportunities, unless you're, you know, someplace

very confined like Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, like Boston, you know, you can't really go much of anywhere there, so you just go up. And so those cities become denser and more convoluted. But everywhere else, you just, you spread out. And so you get, you know, the suburbs and the sprawl. And it's just a completely different experience. And, you know, you do have sprawl around Tokyo, especially, like, you take a train and you go for two hours and you're still seeing, you know, high-rise apartments and things like that. Oh, sure.

Because, you know, you've got, what is it, 15 million people kind of living in this, this, actually, it's more like, is it 50 million people? I can't remember. It's a lot of many, it's many millions of people living together in this kind of small space. But, but, you know, there's not really much else of anywhere to go. because it's such a approach in this country. It's small. It's so full of rivers and waterways. And, you know, it's interesting you bring this up

because I think so many of the fantasy delivery devices that I bring up in my book are answers to urban problems. The Walkman was created. When the Walkman came out, people in cities instinctively latched onto it as a way to kind of tune out the kind of cacophony of the city around them

and to tune out strangers who they'd normally have to have some kind of weird interactions with. Things like the Game Boy, you know, are ways, and even the Famicon are ways that we can game in our own spaces instead of having to go out to arcades and things like that. The karaoke machine arose from a need to entertain salarymen who were basically the engine of all of this industrialization, building factories and office buildings and those skyscrapers in Shinjuku that you saw. All of these things, I think, the really one of the reasons that Japan is so good at making things that appeal to the world is because

it urbanized so much faster than the rest of the world and so much more of Japan is urban by necessity than other countries. Most of Japan's population is crammed into major cities. The countryside are often, they're actually hollowing out now as young people don't have opportunities there and move into the cities. You don't see that as much in America because, as you put it, there's a ton of wide open space out there. You know, there's a lot of, we're just bigger. that's another thing that kind of gave Japan a leg up on creating things that appeal. And also, it's a thing that it's why product more easily went viral in Japan. And because you have such a density of people, it's just like real life viruses. You know, when you pack a lot of people

together, it's easier to get sick, right? Well, the same thing is true of like memes and like, you know, things like the reason the Walkman took off was because people saw other people walking around with it, you know, in their immediate environment, and it kind of spread from there, which is why when that particular product became a hit in America, it became a hit in New York City first and spread from New York City. It wasn't Peoria or like Milwaukee. It was a dense urban area. No, because in Peoria or Milwaukee, you have your own din. You have like a huge, you know, suburban home with a room that's basically dedicated to the high five. So, of course, you sit down in your comfy chair and the sweet spot and you just blast your music. But, you know, in the

big cities, people don't have that. And also, they're constantly on their feet going out to get food or just getting to work or just getting around because there's opportunities to do stuff and socialize that don't exist here. Exactly. Privacy. It's like, you know, portable privacy in a certain sort of sense. And things like Hello Kitty. You know, this was an answer to kind of help little girls, I think, acclimate to a pretty cold educational environment at the time. Hello Kitty products were basically all put on stationary for little girls and backpacks and totes and things like that at first. Now Hello Kitty products are everywhere, and adults use them too. But at first they were basically for helping little girls, you know, acclimate to the Japanese educational system. And that turned out to be, you know, as educational systems around the world became more advanced and became more demanding of their, you know, students and things like that, it turned out that things like Hello Kitty found, niches abroad too. You know, I don't think Sanrio, when they made that, were initially planning on really even thinking about exporting it. And that is actually another interesting thing about

that I learned when I was writing pure invention is how few of these products were created with any thought given to foreign people at all in mind. Yeah, that's definitely been the case with, you know, video games for a long time. So many Japanese games were huge hits in the U.S., but, you know, it was almost like an incidental thing. You know, it took, well, there were a lot of circumstances there. But it took several years for Nintendo to bring the NES over here. Yes. But, you know, even once they did, there were games that it would take sometimes two to three years to reach the U.S. And, you know, that it would take another year after that or maybe longer to reach Europe. Yeah, definitely. So it was really just like a secondary consideration. And, you know,

as a result, there were so many games that were just created with the domestic audience in mind by Japanese developers. And they're so enticing to Americans, but they were never brought over here. They were never localized. And so we just kind of have to look and say, you know, I wish we had been able to play that. Why, why do they hate us so much? And of course, the answer is they don't. They just didn't think. They like, they don't care because it just never occurred to them that, oh, yeah, this

video game about traveling through the streets of Tokyo capturing demons to prevent a digital apocalypse. Like, of course, kids in Peoria would want to play that. Sure. It just never occurred to them. That might be the case. So, you know, there was a huge gap there. It was interesting because Japan.

was, it still is, a very internationalized country, but it became obvious to me when I was talking to Masayuki Iuemura, the engineer of the NES, that when they were making the NES, there was like no thought given to exporting it at all, like the Famicon, I should say. There was no thought given to exporting at all, and it was only once they'd hit the three-year mark, and President Yamauchi was like, you know what, three years, toy fads end in three years, the Famicon's going to be dead, we'd better export it to get another couple years out of this. That was like they're only thinking. It wasn't that, like, we've invented an amazing new way for children to experience digital fantasies. You know what I mean? Like, there was none of that. It was just

purely, we need to squeeze another couple years out of this. Of course, the FondiCon turned out to be much more than just a product, and they squeezed a lot more than a couple extra years out of it. But it's really interesting to me how again and again, even the architects of products that looking back seem like sure things, the architects had no idea that they would become as big of a hit as they did. Well, I do question his recollection of that somewhat, just looking at the chronology of events, because Nintendo was, you know, trying to get the NAS or the Famicon into the U.S. market as early as 1984 as the advanced video system. And of course, you know, Donkey Kong had been a huge hit globally. Yes. And it was designed specifically for the U.S.

audience because of, you know, some miscalculations about exports to the U.S. So, you know, I think, I think the company's higher level people at least were, we're definitely looking abroad, we're thinking globally. But I could definitely see where Uyamura and his team weren't thinking like, oh, let's make this friendly to Americans, where they were just thinking, you know, let's make this work, you know, as a product that we're going to sell here because that's, you know, all they really cared about. So, you know, I think it can be a little of both.

Sure, sure. And, you know, that's the other thing, right? I'm talking to these people, human beings, right? And even when you're talking to your friend's stories can kind of shift and change from time. time, not of any kind of malfeasance or anything like that. So I, it's really interesting to me to kind of triangulate things and talk to multiple people at once. I certainly, you know, when I was researching the Walkman, I managed to track down most of the living members of the development team and hearing their different takes on it and comparing it to what was written about it in books

and things like that was really interesting because sometimes you reveal totally new angles that you never expected and sometimes you realize, oh, well, this is actually what's wrong in the book or this is totally right because three people have told me about it. And, you know, the Nintendo is another one of those, as the Japanese say, you know, the NES is an epoch making, like really profoundly transformative product. So there's a lot been written and talked about on it. But I actually, you know, getting back to the theme of the book, the injection, if we are talking about the injection of Japanese sensibilities into the Western fantasy scape, if you want to call it, there's probably no stronger vector of that than video games.

Like, in Japan, kids grew up on manga and anime, and then game designers incorporated tropes and things from manga and anime and live action shows into video games, like power-ups or growing big in size or, you know, what have you. You know, yokai monsters, things that are kind of endemic in Japanese manga, anime, and live action fair. In the West, we didn't really have much in the way of anime and manga. So those sensibilities were transmitted to us kind of secondarily by video games. And then when we encountered anime, which started coming in and manga in the 90s and early 2000s,

we kind of recognized it from games, I think. So that's an interesting kind of inversion of how things developed in Japan versus the West and how those sensibilities won hearts and minds all over the world. And I think games are really, really key to that. Yeah, I can certainly say that my first encounters with Japanese pop-com culture were video games, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. Sure. Like, I didn't recognize those as Japanese.

And, you know, I didn't really see that big a difference between Donkey Kong and Kubert, which was made by an American company. Right. Like, they were, you know, colorful characters. But, of course, Cubert was influenced by Donkey Kong and by Pac-Man and by Congo-Bongo, especially Congo-Bongo. Geez, like the isometric perspective. Yeah.

So there was this kind of cross-pollination. Like Americans created video games. And then they trickled over to. to Japan and Japan was like oh let's let's do our own thing and uh those ended up back in the US and Americans were like oh that's really great let's do more like these so yeah there was this this great back and forth and I don't know exactly when I recognize like oh this is a thing from Japan yeah but I actually think it was donkey con for me okay well I think you're a few years older than me not not too much but I think for me it was with the NES and

And it was the game Blastermaster, specifically because there was a newsletter that Sunsoft, the publisher and developer, sent out called, I don't know, the Sunsoft Times or something. One of those, you know, a bunch of game companies had those back in the day. In-house organs. Yeah, basically you would like send them, send in a reply card from the game, you know, pull it out of the manual, send it in. And they would put you on their mailing list and send out, you know, a flyer, basically, a newsletter, which is exactly what I'm doing now. at limited run games.

Like, I create exactly that for people when they place orders. So, you know, it's like reliving my childhood over and over again. But, yeah, so I bought Blastermaster, I thought it was really cool and sent in the reply card. And so they started sending, you know, the newsletter every, like, quarter, I think. And the first issue I got, had an interview with an American designer, but he was talking about how he had to design graphics and work with the Japanese team who created the game. Right. And I guess it was at that point where I noticed, like, okay, you know, actually now that he mentions it, every time I see the credits roll in a Nintendo game, it's either got like goofy aliases or it's Japanese names. And I never really thought about that.

But then, you know, I kind of made like made the connection and said, oh, I get it. These games are from Japan. My friends and I were obsessed with the credits on Metroid, where hip Tanaka. And he turned out to be a real guy. That was actually like one of my big. When I interviewed him for the first time, I was like, your name is the very first video game. I remember.

Yes. Because Hiptanaka is such a cool name. Yes, it is. I think he was a little taken aback, but that's fine. Well, you know, it's, I'm old enough to remember when video games were American. Like, the video game industry was American, all the big games were American. Yes, ironically, Atari, with his Japanese name, was American. Yes.

And, like, I remember getting my 2,600. It probably cost, like, $1,000 and, like, modern dollars back then. I remember being really expensive. I also remember the kind of mixture of excitement and disappointment almost every single time you'd slot in an Atari 2,600 game, and the kind of longing that I had for my friends and televisions and Kaliko visions. But I also remember very distinctly the kind of flipping of that, where the suddenly games became Japanese around

1985, like, you know, when the NES really started taking off 85, 86, 87. And at the time, I didn't realize how mind-blowing that was, that Americans had literally blown up their entire industry, or E.T. did, I guess.

E.T. blew up the entire American game industry. It was a concerted effort by many people. Don't worry. It was. I mean, is there any, I mean, there's two things that are crazy to me. Number one, that the American game industry imploded so spectacularly. And number two, that realistically, Americans did not manage to reestablish a beachhead on their own shores for like 15 years until, like, the Xbox came out. I know there was like the links and the Jaguar and like the 3DO and all sorts of attempts.

But basically the Japanese owned the global video gaming industry for like 15 years. That's insane. Console gaming. Yes, console gaming. You know, Americans really migrated, American developers after the Atari crash really migrated to Commodore. and then Amiga and then you know just a PC and that's where their expertise was and that really I think that really came into kind of full blossom sort of in the late late 90s early 2000s when you know you started to see the lines between PCs and consoles blur especially with

dreamcast Xbox all of a sudden hey there were all these American developers and publishers again you know they'd always been there it's just they hadn't been working in the console market and they hadn't really been excelling at console games they'd really been been focused on PC, but as consoles and PCs just sort of became the same thing in a different box. Yeah. Yeah, it really tore down the barriers. And then, and then Japan was forced to scramble to catch up. And they've done a great job of that over the past decade. But, you know, 10 years ago, everyone was like, well, Japan is over. I mean, even Japanese developers like Kaji Inafune were saying, Japan is over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they weren't. You know, it's all cyclical.

It is. But, you know, I think there's a Japanese creators. tend to be better at making things than software, just in general. I'm putting games aside, because games, to me, are almost integral with the hardware, if you're talking about consoles in particular. But, like, the minute, Japan kind of won the hardware wars, which is also a great movie from the early 80s. Japan won the hardware wars, but kind of lost the software wars, I think, in a lot of ways. And now, as you're well aware, this is kind of Galapagosization of the Japanese gaming market

where you have these like massive, massive hits in Japan, like Monster Hunter that aren't hits abroad. Now it kind of is, it was taking off a little bit more. But for a long time, it wasn't. Yeah, now that tends to be more on the mobile side, like Grand Blue Fantasy and things like that that are just, you know, you know, the side games stuff. It's just, it's unspeakably massive over there. And here, no one really knows it.

Yeah, because you get all those like puzzle and dragons and things like that. Remember there was, I don't know if you remember, but like two or three, maybe more more now, there was a big kind of scandal here about the, they were called Kompu Gotcha, like, where you would randomly get kind of loot in games in a sort of like one-arm bandit

style, almost like gambling, and like Japanese love that style of game, and Westerners just find it really cheesy and dumb and don't. So it's, yeah, there was a big bifurcation about what the different audiences wanted, I think, out of digital entertainment, starting about

10 years back. your book didn't really have too much about Pachinko did it well Pachinko you know so this is the really interesting thing it does a little but when Japan's first smash hit video game came out in 1978 which was Space Invaders it was immediately compared to Pachinko and immediately began competing with Pachinko and there's actually a really interesting

NHK documentary from 1979 that I found and quoted extensively in that chapter that basically says space invaders is Pachinko and that the Pachinko industry is in trouble because young people are migrating from that to this. So I think another reason that video games took off so quickly in Japan and why domestic games were so good, or the best ones in the war anyway,

was because there's this established industry of adults playing games that we just didn't have in the West. like pinball arcades were probably the closest thing, but those were like for juvenile delinquents to hang out in greasers. Like that, like you wouldn't see 40-year-old guys hanging out in there, you know, but you would in Japan at Pachinko place. Yeah, I mean, here you have, you know, Vegas slots,

but gambling is very illegal in most places. And I feel like, you know, the Vegas thing appeals to a certain audience, but not the mass audience the Pachinko appeals to in Japan. Yes, because the stakes are so low. Like, you know, Pichinko is. gambling, but like you'd really, I mean, I don't even think it's possible to make four digits profit in a day of like really successful Pichinko ink. Do you know what I mean? Like it's, at most you're going to make a couple hundred bucks. So nobody's really in it for the money. This isn't

like, oh, I'm going to become a professional blackjack player and like buy a mansion, you know, like nobody's ever bought a mansion off Pichinko. And they probably lost a mansion off Pichinko, but nobody's actually, you know, built one. So it's a very different sort of scene. And I think that also feeds into why those sorts of app experiences that we were just talking about are popular in Japan versus America, that Pachinko kind of fills a need in Japanese society that that's something that won't ever be exported, I don't think. That's very, you know, unique to the Japanese marketplace and mindset for whatever reason. Right. Yeah, but it's funny because, like, for a while there, like, you know, especially in the anime industry and stuff and the games, like, in the early aughts and like the early teens, it seems. like the Pachinko parlors were getting all of the good machines, like with all of the bells and whistles

and cool animations and graphics and stuff like that, because video game arcades had really fallen out of style by that point in Japan. And that's just, it's a really interesting, unique part of the marketplace here that's just not replicable anywhere else, I don't think. Yeah, my first trip ever to Japan was in 2001. So I feel like, you know, I got to see sort of the very tail end of the scene that existed there in the 90s, but, you know, by the time I started going regularly, five or six years later, that had really faded. And at this point, it's definitely gone. And you really have to look around for, you know, anything beyond just like the kind of surface level retro gaming shop or like an arcade that's mostly, you know, UFO catchers and

redemption prizes at this point. Yeah. There's a beautiful, amazing art. arcade in Takata no Baba, which is right on the Yamanote line in Tokyo. But the problem is, is that because smoking is allowed indoors, we actually went there together, I believe. Yeah, yeah, Mikato. You were in Japan. And it smells so bad in there. Like, I literally can't take it for more than like 15 or 20 minutes, which really sucks because it's a perfect, I think, replica of, not even a replica. It's been there since the Showa era for like, you know, decades and decades and it has the kind of scum and like filth and like you know cigarette stains and burns on

the on the consoles to prove it but right but it also has machines that i've never seen anywhere else like it has you know the the triple wide derayas machines and things like that oh yeah and also like they have like a bunch of like knockoff stuff like dragon bowl the knockoff dragon ball game which is just like the ugliest sprites you ever i think it's like a rip-off of a of a ninja turtles game where they've re-skinned the sprites with Goku and, like, you know, he's fighting like rhinoceroses or something. It doesn't make any sense at all. But I love that they have, like, those guys, their curation is really on point.

Like, no argument, no problem there. I just wish they put in some more air filters or something. Yeah, that's the kind of place where you go and you take a smoking break, and it's you going outside to fresh air to get a break from the smoking. Yes, it's like second, third hand smoke. I don't even know what it is at that point. It's like they might as well just inject it in your veins. Really, like I feel bad for the people who work there because they, their lungs must look terrible, just like, you know, solid white on the x-ray.

People often ask me, you know, I've been living here in Tokyo for 20 years now and they're like, anything you miss about America. And, you know, of course I miss like my family and my close friends who I used to live close to, but is there anything that I don't like about living here? And the number one thing is that they allow smoking in so many establishments. And that's changing now. And also, that hasn't been a problem since at least March, because I haven't been going to any establishments. But my wife and I have actually stopped going to restaurants where they allow smoking. It's just, we just don't enjoy it anymore, you know. We'll go to a different place where it's banned, even if that restaurant isn't as good as the one with smoking.

Matt, I've got a great idea for a great idea for a podcast. You and me, we watch movies, right? And some of them are kind of bad, and so we make fun of them. But maybe some of them are good. Chris, that's a great idea. Let's do it. And eat snacks. Movie Fighters, an original idea on the Greenlit Podcast Network. How does Bloodborn stack up against, say, Oregon Trail? And is Bomber Man just Lod Runner from a different point of view?

Find out on Hardcore Gaming 101's top games, where we objectively, definitively, and scientifically rank the games you nominate for our ever-growing list. HG 101's top games. Twice a week, every week, right here on Greenlit. Running Diagnostics in three, two. Men like that is a podcast. Good so far?

That really sucks. Oh, no. Shut her down. Shut her down. They thought they could make something funny. They can't do anything. They can't do. Before mission.

Listen to men like that. There are a lot of podcasts with comic book reviews and interviews with some of the greatest creators in the industry. But only one will tell you scientifically with the worst comic book of all time is. And the best. We've been ranking comic book stories for six years. We have a list with over a thousand comics on it and we're adding more every month. Or Rocket Ajax on the Greenlit podcast network. So, yeah, back to the video game angle of all this. You know, actually, you were talking earlier about how the density of Japanese cities, specifically Tokyo,

really aids and abets the viral spread of ideas and creations. And, you know, beyond just like the big ideas, you know, the Walkman and so forth, becoming popular there, you know, you do sometimes see creators take advantage of the population density there and the mobility of everyone with things like the street pass on Nintendo 3DS. Like, that's something that really only worked in that country. Right. They made it available outside Japan, but unless you lived in, you know, New York City or San Francisco,

you barely ever got street passes. You'd have to go to a penny arcade expo or something in order to fill out your street passes. And, you know, I didn't have any problem with it because I lived in San Francisco working at the offices of IGN. So it was like the densest concentration of nerds in America. Sure, sure, sure, sure. But that was an unusual situation. That was extraordinary. But, you know, in Japan, that kind of thing works.

Like, it was super popular and became like a, you know, kind of like a cultural phenomenon for a while. Well, I don't know if you, I know you remember this, but I don't know if your listeners will. Do you remember, like, the, around the Tamagochi era, the Dreamcast had memory cards that actually had a little LCD panels on them, and you could kind of take and kind of... Right, the VMU. Yes, exactly. And you can kind of take and, like, grind on those things when you're on the train and then kind of plug it back into the machine. Oh, the PlayStation had this, didn't it? Who had this?

I remember there was a little... Okay, PlayStation came out with the Pocket Station. Yes. But I think actually the Dreamcast VMU might have come first because Dreamcast launched in June 98 in Japan. Right, right. And the Pocket Station, the first games I remember seeing for that were Final Fantasy 8, Ridge Racer type 4. Those were all like 1999 games. So I think Sega did it.

And PlayStation was like, whoa, we got to get in on that. Just, you know, just like analog controls and Rumble showed up on N64. And Sode was immediately like, whoa, we got to do that too. Well, I think that the fact that so many people in this country commute on trains and have nothing to do for like two hours out of their day kind of promotes the creation of gadgets and play styles that you don't see in the West where people are driving to work or don't have that kind of commute experience that they do here. I mentioned the Tomoguchi before. I think that's another example. That's something that probably Americans never would have come up with. it was created for schoolgirls on the streets of Tokyo, and it filled this kind of need that ended up going far beyond, like, the idea of being able to have a pet in a very tiny

space, or if your house doesn't allow pets or whatever, here's like a digital one, and that that kind of obligated you to take care of it, that kind of a product that actually disadvantages the owner. That's a very kind of Japanese sense of play, and I think it was fueled by the fact that there is so much downtime in getting between places in in big cities in Japan. Yeah, I remember buying a Tomoguchi back when they were, you know, first on the scene, but living in Texas where I had to drive everywhere. And the first time my Tomoguchi freaked out and was like, I'm going to die if you don't pay attention to me now. I was like driving at 70 miles per hour down the freeway. I was like, sorry, kid, you're on your own. I started to like reach over and

realized, well, I'm going to drift off the road if I do this. I got to keep my eyes ahead. So yeah, Tomaguchi, not so much for the car commute. It's more for the train commute. But, you know, that's a huge part of entertainment design there, for sure. Like, I remember talking to one of the producers on the Dragon Quest series a few years back about the mobile ports of the early Dragon Quest games. And, you know, he was talking about how they specifically wanted to make them for mobile and specifically simplified the interface so they could be one-handed.

And I was like, oh, I see. And I made a gesture like I was reaching onto a train. strap and holding the phone in one hand. And he just laughed. He was like, yeah, you get it. That's totally, you know, the market we're going for is the daily commuter. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think, you know, emoji kind of came from that too. I mean, they were really popularized among Japanese women, but it's easier to type out like a face than this whole sentence. Do you know what I mean? Or, you know, a thumbs up or whatever than this whole sentence. And you can do it with one finger. Yeah, the whole, the whole emoji and pager history section of pure invention,

was really interesting to me because in America, you think pagers, you think like drug, drug dealers. Right, yeah. But it's a totally different thing. And it's become so pervasive, such a defining part of internet, you know, communication and just interpersonal communication now for everyone. Well, it's just, you know, Japanese schoolgirls are the first people on the planet to really mobile text in a kind of youth culture context. They are the ones who repurposed pagers, beepers. to send kind of like numeric, Japanese, the Japanese language, you can also express words kind of numerically because numbers are pronounced as numbers, but they also have phonetic

pronunciations too. So you can type in a string of numbers, and if you read them phonetically, as opposed to numerically, you can kind of decipher a message out of them. And that's where texting sort of started, you know, girls sending messages back and forth to each other, and it snowballed from there. And, yeah, it's interesting because From about 1993 to maybe 2003, like Japanese schoolgirls were the planet's early adopters and like total tech gatekeepers. You know, especially in Japan, you did not make a piece of high-tech technology that didn't take their needs into account. And famously, when Apple released the iPhone in Tokyo, which was around 2003 or 4th, I don't remember exactly what year, it didn't include emoji and it totally failed. It was the only country on the planet where the iPhone failed.

And so SoftBank scrambled to come up with this patch that would allow emoji to be used on there. And that finally was what it needed. But the people at Apple must have been like WTF, like every other country loves this thing. Why not this? And it was because of emoji. You know, Japanese schoolgirls basically blew up Apple. It's really funny. It kind of reminds you of like, you know, those K-pop stands.

like K-pop kids blowing up Trump rallies and things like that. Right, they're the new generation. Yeah, well, you know, when you're, you know, if you are a big enough consumer base, you're a movement. Like, it doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you're on. You're a movement, you know. Japanese schoolgirls were only interested in, like, you know, partying and, like, connecting and having more fun with each other,

but it turns out that the ways that they connected with each other presaged all of the stuff that we'd be doing with Facebook and Twitter and all of that stuff in the future. You know, Japan is really good at, like, coming up with these kind of things, grassroots, and then they're really bad at, like, monetizing it, which is why, like, Silicon Valley is the one who created Twitter and created Facebook and not, you know, some schoolgirl who grew up into a tech mogul. Has Twitter actually been monetized, though?

Like, yeah, okay, that's the other thing. It's all funny money, right? Like, what is money? Like, we're living in this, like, very late stage capitalist post-industrial landscape that really nobody has any idea how to navigate at all, which is another reason why so many of these gadgets appealed to us, because Japan has been living in that post-industrial, you know, late-stage capitalist landscape since like 1990. You know, this is why Japan was the first to invent words like Hikikomori, people who like never leave their house or like otaku, people who define their

identities by their things that they consume, by their fandoms, you know? It's why Japan came up with, you know, the world's first workable, portable, portable game systems or virtual pets, you know, because people were struggling with how to live in this kind of economically apocalyptic landscape. Now we're all there, right? We're all living in this apocalyptic landscape that also has this viral kind of apocalypse on top of it. Yeah, I mean, now we're all hikigomori, but not my choice. Which is why, you know, it was amazing to me that the middle of a plague, like we're in the middle of black death and Animal Crossing sells two million copies on day one.

Like, that's insane, you know, the latest Animal Crossing game. We're in the middle of, like, probably the worst thing humanity has faced in the century. And what do we do? We turn to the virtual escapes, video games and things like that. Video game companies are doing great amid all of this. Yeah, I mean, even the retro gaming scene, like, you know, even though people are, you know, panicked about losing work and not getting unemployment and so forth, the value and the auction prices of retro gaming stuff has just skyrocketed.

And, you know, I even put some stuff up, you know, cleaning out my office, cleaning out my house, put some stuff up on eBay and was blown away by how much more I ended up making from that than I expected. It's, it is really interesting. Like, you know, especially the way Animal Crossing just seemed to land at the perfect time to give people this outlet. Like, I don't, Nintendo could not have planned that. Like, it was. It was just an absolute great grace note for them. Again, it's bringing the outdoors indoors. Like you're able to kind of vacation on this island.

And to socialize. Yes, and that's even more important, right? Yeah, like my wife is not a video game player. But I ended up letting her try Animal Crossing, you know, about 10 days or so after it came out. And she's put in something like 700 hours on that game. And most of it was, you know, during the really like the worst of the pandemic, her business is photography. She goes out and shoots real estate

and she shoots television shows like the still photography for those and she couldn't do any of that when everything was shut down. Like even now, her hosts are Canadian for the TV show so she can't go and, you know, they're not filming because the hosts are stranded in Canada right now.

So for her, like who is a very social person who's always with her family, her cousins who live here in town, always out doing her business. like she wasn't able to go out and make a living and she wasn't able to spend time with her people. So Animal Crossing was, you know, for a couple of months, like a thing. Yeah, it was like her escape, her chance to connect to people.

And, you know, there's only so much that I can provide, you know, because I'm always working and, you know, you get sick of a person's face after a while. So I'm really glad that she had Animal Crossing, but it is just remarkable happenstance that that hit when it did and so perfectly. filled the needs of so many people in a really, really difficult time. Yeah, well, I feel like we're living Death Stranding and we're escaping into Animal Crossing. It's kind of, it's like Animal Crossing is like a mini game inside Death Stranding and we're all stuck inside that game is kind of what I feel like. But, you know, it's interesting to me in the research I was doing for the book how again and again I would find cases where the Western media would cover some aspect of Japanese, some Japanese

social phenomenon and basically make fun of it. You know, back in the 80s, oh my God, there's grown-ups who are watching cartoons. Oh, man, they call themselves Otaku. You know, what a bunch of nerds, only in Japan, you know, that kind of thing. And again and again, these trends that were happening in Japan that we thought were limited to Japan, that the West thought was limited to Japan. Oh, look, grown-up people are escaping into virtual video game escapes. Boy, they're really denying reality. Oh, they're staying at home. They're not getting married. They're not. you know, finding girlfriends. They're not starting families. Wow, weird, weird. Every single one of these trends is now happening in the West. You know, the decline of the birth rate. People living

at home for longer periods of time because they can't afford to move out. You know, grownups consuming kid culture, you know, everything from the video games we're talking about to like the Marvel movie boom and even things like the fads for cupcakes and all sorts of comfort foods and things like that, adult coloring books. Our, you know, society abroad has come in, in many ways to resemble that of Japan. And that's why these products continue again and again to kind of enthrall us. And I think that is kind of the takeaway from the book, which is that this isn't just a, you know, a curation of hit, cool products and their backstories, which it is. It's literally all of our stories. All of us who have consumed this stuff and kind of, you know,

turned into entirely different human beings because of it. Yeah, and, you know, and, you know, it's on, you know, it's not. always for the best, the final chapter of your book. I don't want to get too much into this, but it explores, you know, sort of, you know, the, I guess the most recent way that the Japanese culture and internet and, you know, all that has sort of influenced international culture. Yes. You know, looking back at Nichan or Nichanu. How do you say it's, Nih Channel. So it's, in Japan, it's Nih Channel. And that gave rise to an image board called Futaba Channel, which also sounds like New Channel pronounced differently. This is that whole digits having phonetic and

numerical pronunciations. And then Futava Channel turned out to be the inspiration for 4chan. 4chan literally took Futaba Channel software and translated it into English using Babelfish. Remember that? And famously, actually, that moment was a huge key moment in global English-speaking world culture because the Japanese boards, if you didn't provide a user, name just called you nameless. But when he used the, when, when Chris Poole, Moot, who founded 4chan, used the Babelfish software to translate that came across as anonymous, which has a kind of different connotation, I think, to it than Nameless does. And as we all know, has given a rise to a movement in and of itself. But I, you know, yes, yes. So like a love or hate

like 4chan, I think, I don't think a lot of people are, or, we're aware of just how deep. its Japanese roots went. Like, it started out as like an anime appreciation board, like, you know, all sorts of anime from, you know, mainstream stuff to hentai, and mainly hentai, probably. But, and then it kind of exploded into so much more and became sort of the DNA of the internet as, as we know it today. And that's just another example of how the Japaneseation of our tastes, the kids who founded 4chan had been raised on anime. They loved anime. They loved video games. They loved, you know, Hello Kitty stuff. They loved all of this stuff from Japan, not because it was Japanese, but because they

were consuming it just like Japanese people were. And as that crashed into American mainstream culture, we got all sorts of weird and terrifying social phenomena that we'd probably rather not think about. Yep. So we won't think too much about that. But, you know, I will say that the last chapter of the book, I went into it thinking, like, this is going in a direction that I did not foresee, and I'm really not sure where he's going with all this.

But by the end of it, you had made a really great case for tackling the topics that you did and tying it back to this sort of evolving popular culture and general culture coming out of Japan and the influence that it's had on other societies. And it was really illuminating. You know, kind of a difficult read in some places but you know sometimes that's reality for you and yes one especially for you is a games

journalist yes definitely hit close to home some some bad experiences there but you know you you handled it with uh i would say tact and with a lot of a lot of painstaking research and lots of like the i the book was actually shorter than i thought because the bibliography at the the citations at the end yes are so extensive it is absolutely one of the best researched and so sourced books that I've I've read in a long time and applies this sort of academic rigor to you know, uh, Pokemon and Hello Kitty, which is, which is surprising. But, you know, there really is a lot there. And it really, you know, for someone like me who grew up really loving Nintendo games and playing Sega at my friend's house and then went on to play Sony, like it really is

fascinating to see just how closely that's tied to, you know, this entire. other country and culture that I've seen for so long as an outsider and just kind of, you know, dipped my toe in a little bit, but never really had the opportunity to explore it with the depth that it deserves. Well, you know, I just, I wanted to make an argument. I didn't want this to be like, you know, this is what Matt all thinks about Japan because, you know, that's just like your opinion, man, you know, and it's like I, which I respect when people tell me what their opinions are about Japan. I respect it very much. But I wanted this to be an argument that was rooted in some kind of reporting and fact. And, you know, that's why I was really insistent

that it be footnoted so extensively so that when I make a claim, you can go back into the back of the book and see at least where I'm calling that from, you know, and get a sense for where my thinking is because, you know, there's so many books on Japan out there, and some of them are great, you know, but they're more like in the lines of like memoirs or, you know, this is, I went to Japan and this is what I saw. Well, there's a lot of that stuff out there and people see things in different ways. I wanted to kind of pull quotes from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and let, not me, but let the creators of these products speak about why they did what they did and how they felt when they made it. And, you know, I'm happy you felt it was a fast read. It's actually

quite a long book. It's 100,000 words, even without the footnotes. So it's not a short text by any means, but I keep hearing this again and again from people like you. Wow, I thought it would, you know, I thought it was much longer than it was, which is great. That means people are, people are reading it quickly. No, it just, it flies by because it is something, you know, it's about topics that are so familiar to me and have been such a part of my life and then just giving them more context and rooting them in history and saying like, hey, let's talk about this little tin jeep that, you know, doesn't, like, no one even has one of these anymore. There's, There's, like, one that exists in the world, even though it was this massive, you know, million-selling product.

And tying that to the Walkman and to karaoke and to the Nintendo Entertainment System and the PlayStation and beyond. Like, it's, it was just very fascinating and really illuminating to see so much history woven around, you know, things that are escapism, time-wasters, but do have merit and do have substance to them. And, you know, I feel like, I feel like the, the case you know, laid out in the book explains why something like Pokemon or Super Mario Brothers has that substance that you might not expect to see from a video game because it does have this heritage behind it and it does speak to this kind of collective perspective that is different than, you know, the one that I've grown up with and that I have myself. And it's, I guess, you know, some people have the ability to

empathize with those who are not exactly like them and to project themselves and you know to ask themselves like what is it like to be you know someone who is not me and I feel like I get a lot of that when I

you know I kind of immerse myself in that when I really try to grasp the design of a game from Japan you know not all of them are great I've played a whole lot of shitty ones but you know the best of them really capture something that you just don't get in American design games, at least not, you know, mass market products, maybe in indie spaces. But, you know, I feel like indie game

developers tend to be more likely than not people who can empathize and put them, like, take themselves out of their own shoes. And, you know, so many indie games are about empathy and about, you know, learning to see the world in a different way. And, well, it's a communication. You know, you're communicating with the, you're in a dialogue with the player. It's just like any form of art. You know, when you make a painting, you're in the dialogue with the people looking at it, even though you're not specifically standing right there next to them. And video games are arguably even more of a dialogue because the player isn't just watching a video game.

They're actually participating in it. And, you know, when I was a kid in the kind of hippie movement was still going on, there was a famous catalog called The Whole Earth Catalog that was subtitled Access to Tools, and it was meant to give hippies the kind of tools they needed to make, their way in a kind of agrarian or like kind of a commune sort of situation. Everything in pure invention is a tool. It's a tool to help us, this new generation, this post-boomer generations, make our way through a world that is more complex and confusing than any generation has ever faced before. And that's why video games and

all sorts of gadgets out of Japan or, you know, play such a fundamental role in all of our alliance today. Yeah, and I feel, you know, the best Japanese media has been addressing that for decades and, you know, video games like NIR, you know, that's a huge part of NIR is what happens when you take the B route and you start to understand the nature of the monsters that you're killing or look back to the, you know, the late 70s, early 80s with Gundam. Like, the whole point of that was that, you know, you're seeing the world through the eyes of Amaro Ray, but. Exactly. But he's not the only hero and you know like his enemies they have perspectives and even though they're kind of rendered in broad Nazi-esque strokes sometimes you know not all of them are basically space

Hitler some of them have meaningful opinions and they they feel loss as well and so Ultraman was the same way Ultraman like the Kaiju that Ultraman fought were often very pathetic or or sad and it was obvious that like when ultraman or ultra seven is like chopping these things to death he's actually kind of traumatizing himself at the same time and that is ultra man those ultraman blue rays are on my list or on my my stack of things to watch soon so i didn't realize there was that that much to it so i'm looking forward to him well literally without ultraman and without ultra seven you wouldn't have evangelian period like it's it's very much the the way that shingi fights these creatures that are unfathomable and have their own motivations and are often kind of traumatic and

psychologically damaging to him to fight comes directly from that that kind of Toksatsu, that Japanese live-action sci-fi idiom mashed with Gundam, I think. And then he copes with it by riding the train listening to the Walkman or the minidusk player, but you know, same thing. Bringing things full circle. Well, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely.

It was great talking to you. I hope we actually get to meet up in person sometime before too long. That would be nice. Yeah, whether it's here in the U.S. or over in Japan, either way, it would mean travel is safe again. Absolutely. I look forward to that day, too. Yes. But in the meantime, would you like to tell everyone where they can find you online and where they can find pure invention?

Yes. So, Matt Alt, Pure Invention, how Japan's pop culture conquered the world, is, it's a mainstream release. You should be able to find it anywhere books are sold. Amazon, you know, Barnes & No. Powell's, anywhere books are sold, your bookstore should be able to order it. And you can find me online. I'm on Twitter at Matt underscore alt. I'm on Instagram at Alt, Matt Alt. I'm on Facebook. I'm everywhere. I'm everywhere. Find me. Come seek me out. Talk to me. I love having conversations about this stuff. All right. So thanks again, Matt. And everyone definitely,

I definitely recommend checking out Pure Invention. It's a great read, a fast read, and you will learn a lot. And if you are the kind of person who enjoy Retronauts, it's absolutely down your alley. So I say this, I'm not taking, I'm not, I'm not getting a commission, just a, just a great read. Thank you. Thanks again, Matt. And please go out and have some interesting Japanese gin for me until I'm able to get, get over there again. I promise. Let's have a, let's have a podcast about gin next. Absolutely. All right, thanks again. Thank you. I'm sorry.

Thank you.