The future looks anime

Thanks, Japan

The Book:

Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World
By Matt Alt
Crown
2021

The Talk:

North America is functionally an island, with island nations on either side.

From one island nation, we receive all our pre-modern fantasies: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, King Arthur, Narnia.

From the other island nation, we receive all our modern ones: Pokémon, Mario, Sonic, Transformers, Power Rangers.

From the British Isles, we get our middlebrow culture: A Christmas Carol, Romeo & Juliet, Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, Cats, Riverdance.

From Japan, we get our youth culture: anime, manga, cosplay, and 4chan.

One island feeds our musical culture: In the past, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Queen. Today, Harry Styles, Ed Sheeran, Adele.

The other island feeds our visual culture: 😜👍🍕🔥👀🎉😂❤🌎📖🙌🤢

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The British-American cultural exchange goes back about 400 years (if you count the years we were English). In contrast, the Japanese-American cultural exchange began only about 170 years ago, in the 1850s, when American naval warships forced open Japanese ports to Western trade.

And yet when we think of the defining spirit of modern American life—texting obsessively on our phones with earbuds in our ears, sharing funny memes, playing cutesy casual games like Candy Crush, making sure our Animal Crossing island is maintained, attending comic conventions dressed up like our favorite superhero, imagining we could one day be minor celebrities or Internet famous—all of this has its roots in Japan.

In his book Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World, author Matt Alt charts the history of Japanese pop culture, from the end of World War II to the COVID-19 pandemic. Along the way he tells the Japanese back stories behind many products, brands, and franchises that Americans take for granted today, that feel like, well, us.

The 80-year mutual love affair between Japan and America

Alt begins his history at the occupation of Japan by American forces at the end of World War II. Remarkably, one of the first (and most popular) toys produced after the war in Japan for Japanese children was a toy Jeep, a ubiquitous sight at the time.

In the decades following, Japan rebuilt and became a major global manufacturing hub for cheap goods. Cheap was the watchword for everything. The distinctive anime style of animation, in which a scene is mostly frozen, except for a moving mouth, was originally a cost-saving measure.

In the same way, rather than inventing or even using cutting edge technology, many Japanese innovations of the 20th Century used off-the-shelf well-established technologies in creative ways.

• The karaoke machine mashed together a coin operator, a speaker, a microphone, and an 8-track player—turning the ordinary person into a music star.

• The Sony Walkman used existing products, but modified them so that someone could add a soundtrack to their life, as if they were living in a movie.

• The Game Boy’s graphics were behind the state of the art when it came out, but it’s portability, design, and plethora of games made it one of the best-selling consoles of all time.

• The Tamagotchi virtual pet was a egg-shaped keychain that you had to take care of to grow and keep alive. It, too, was not innovative technologically, but it used well-worn technology in a creative way.

Americans gobbled up these Japanese products. But the Japanese were absorbing American culture, too. Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” was a huge hit as a karaoke track. Snoopy became a beloved character in Japan. The name “Donkey Kong” combined a stubborn animal with the creator’s favorite kaiju—King Kong. And, of course, there’s Mario and Luigi, Japanese characters from New York.

After the 1990 economic crash in Japan, which led to two decades of societal malaise, Japan’s cultural exports became visual and interactive. Pokémon fever swept America in the 1990s, and again in 2016, when Pokémon Go exploded onto the scene. (The app has now been downloaded over a billion times.)

Anime and manga (Japanese comic book) fandoms grew during this time, leading to worries about a whole generation of Japanese men who were unmarried, living with their parents, obsessed with video games and comics, and in love with big-eyed anime characters. Otaku is the name for this kind of super-fan, so absorbed into virtual-fictional worlds that they would rather be there than in the “real world.”

It was this fandom base out of which rose 2chan, an anonymous message board, in 2003. 2chan inspired 4chan in the US shortly after. Both 2chan and 4chan, in both countries, eventually devolved into alt-right hangouts for young single men who felt left behind by society. (In Japan it’s known as the netto uyoku or “net right-wing.”) In one chilling quote, white supremacist Richard Spencer tweeted: “Anime—indeed, even anime porn—has done more to advance European civilization than the Republican Party.”

Alt notes, however, that anime and manga fandom in the US isn’t a uniquely alt-right thing. Many African Americans have found in manga stories and characters a way to understand their own underdog experiences, and LGBT subcultures overlap with these fandoms as well. Alt writes:

“If one were to draw a Venn diagram of shared interests—with circles for Japan’s otaku and netto uyoku net-rightists, for the far-left Antifa and the alt-right, for Gamergaters and YouTubers and edgelords who define themselves by outraging others, for Black Lives Matter supporters and for LGBT activists—the overlap would center, improbably, on things Japanese: manga, anime, and the idea of Japan as a fantasyland in and of itself.”

The future is going to look weird

I own a Nintendo Switch, and I grew up with Mario, but I’m definitely not part of the otaku subculture. For these reasons, I suspect I vastly underestimate the latent power of these cultural forces. And I suspect many Americans do, too. Consider the following:

1. Today more manga comics are sold in the US than American comics.

2. Crunchyroll, an anime streaming service, is among the top streaming services available in the Apple app store.

3. In 2019, the website Pornhub announced that “hentai” had been the second-most-used search term for three years running, according to Alt.

4. On YouTube, Twitch, and VR Chat, influencers livestream themselves as virtual avatars using motion capture technology, with the most common avatars being anime characters.

5. New AI-based technologies, like chatbots and image generators, are being used to generate an infinite flood of anime characters.

All this comes at a time in America, somewhat similar, but not entirely, to Japan’s recent Lost Decades, which were marked by an aging, shrinking population, and a younger generation of disaffected young people who felt more at home in the virtual, digital, fictional, and fantasy world than in the physical world of in-person social interactions.

Put that way, the metaverse is kind of already here. For some, at least. But if we speculate what technological innovation has in store for us around the corner, be it immersive VR or human-like AI, it’s easy to guess what this future is going to look and feel like. It’s going to be kawaii (cutesy, adorable). It’s also going to be otaku.

---

Related:

Wisdom is seeking wisdom: Dogen's contemplative path

Loneliness is the price we pay for modern life

PONPONPON (YouTube)

The Mirrors of VRChat (YouTube)