In the 1970s and '80s, Japan soared on the superior technology of Sony and Toyota while the West struggled to catch up. Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the "lost decades" of deep recession and social dysfunction. They should have plunged Japan into irrelevance; instead its cultural clout soared. Hello Kitty, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and entertainment empires like Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z--artfully packaged, dangerously cute, and dizzyingly fun--made Japan the forge of the world's fantasies, and gave us new tools for coping with trying times. Alt reveals how Japanese ingenuity remade global culture and may have created modern life as we know it. -- adapted from jacket