A fascinating take on the effects that Japanese has had (and continues to have) on the rest of the world. This is very much a cultural history grounded in technology, and in the ways that technology drives new cultural possibilities. It’s also often a study in the illogic of cultural trends, and how impossible it is to pick cultural winners.

The history of the karaoke machine justifies the book on its own. The vignettes are fascinating, perhaps most of all for me the way in which the actual machines were invented several times in response to different driving forces. But the most outstanding observation was how one of the inventors realised that perfect reproduction of songs wasn’t the goal, and spent years re-recording tracks to make them easier for karaoke-singers to perform well. This is the sort of techno-cultural feedback that’s fascinating.

Alt tries to draw the threads together, noting that in many ways what Europe and America are suffering in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was presaged by Japan’s “Lost decades”, making the Japanese experience perhaps more characteristic of late-stage capitalism than we realised. It’s an interesting point: I’m not sure Europe will ever have otaku in quite the same way that Japan has, but that’s again a techno-cultural interaction in progress as we see whether social trends follow the technological or vice versa.

5/5. Finished Monday 25 April, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)