Japan

“First was the release of the movie Rising Sun and the outburst of "japan bashing" that it caused, and second was the public debate over organ transplantation and problems associated with people who had suffered brain death injuries.”

“Even though we're behind schedule, everyone at KCE Japan has been obsessed with Mario Kart 64. On break everyone rushes over to snatch up a controller, and the people waiting grab a Sega Saturn 3D control pad and do "image training", mimicking the movements while they watch and wait their turn.”

“Ever since middle school or thereabouts, for the longest time, I had wanted to make movies.”

“Our generation, raised on manga and western cinema, got used to the sight and idea of guns, but growing up here in Japan, in our actual lives there were no guns or gun violence. Our generation also witnessed the rise of environmental destruction and pollution, and an "end of the world" mentality was planted in our minds.”

“Metal Gear Solid sells more in Europe and America than Japan. I was unapologetic about making something Japanese in taste, but amazingly it was received with more passion and enthusiasm by people overseas.”

“I wouldn't dictate to them - "you should do things this way, use this color, change this..." - I'd have to really try to help them do what they do best as production studios. That's how I plan to do it in the future, and to give them freedom.”

“There's kind of a unique system where we learn many different parts of economics, marketing, or other things... English too, or even a third language - I studied Spanish.”

“I first met Ishii this year, but I knew about him a long time previous. I get told by people that there are only three guys in Japan who like adventures: me, Ishii and Shu Takumi.”

After returning to Japan following the freight-elevator incident, Kojima bought the DVD of Elevator to the Gallows and watched it for the first time in about forty years. The film proved different from his childhood impressions: he felt sympathy for Jeanne Moreau and realized it was not film noir to him but a hymn to love. He concluded that he had been trapped inside that movie for decades and that the real elevator accident had set in motion again the elevator that had long stood still in his heart.

After the Tohoku earthquake, fans and associates from around the world advised Kojima to leave Japan and use his life and resources to create elsewhere rather than spend them rebuilding the past. Kojima did not leave: he realized he could not separate his own purpose from Japan’s reconstruction and that, despite considering himself cosmopolitan, his substance was innately Japanese. Satori helped him out of the standstill with a further conclusion: he should not confine himself to Eastern, Western, or national labels, but create and share his own world—the world of Hideo Kojima.

The day before Sakyo Komatsu’s death, Kojima saw Japan Sinks on a special display in a bookstore and bought it; he felt a sense of fate because an earthquake had forced the public to rediscover the author. Seeking to understand what Komatsu might have felt about Tohoku, Kojima reacquired several of Komatsu’s works, and an adult rereading of Virus superimposed a scene of skeletons in Tokyo Bay with 3/11 in his mind and moved him to tears.

In 2011 Kojima described a difference between Eastern and Western design: in Japan players are placed in a room with one door that leads to a room with two doors, and so on, so the game opens up gradually; in the West players can be dropped into a jungle early on, where freedom and exploration are valued.

One year after March 11, Kojima remained distressed by the earthquake and radioactive contamination: he feared that Japan could disappear as a nation and that he could lose his sense of belonging as a Japanese person. That anxiety led him back to Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy to ask what it means to lose one’s homeland.

While meeting George Miller in Japan during the promotion of Mad Max: Fury Road, Kojima told him that his games are made inheriting various genes from the director, and that if he exists it is because Miller existed.

“Even when I went to the bank, I couldn't borrow money. They said, 'We know you're renowned, but you don't have any actual results.'”

“I received the 72nd Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts from the Agency of Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan. Thank you very much. I have been creating games for 36 years.”

“It's called NOPE, but for me, it was a resounding yes.”

“When we were younger, good camera technology didn't exist, so we assumed that strange things existed but just weren't caught on camera. So for us, UFOs were real.”

“Well, in Japan, they sell movie pamphlets at the theatre, and I saw that they had shot it in the daytime. They didn't have the technology to film at night back then.”

“And whenever you visit a record shop or rental store, you knew that the staff there were all music lovers. […] Everyone was like Tarantino.”

“The first person is Stephen King. King has never let me down.”

“There are a lot of authors overseas who are like former Special Forces members, which you don't really see in Japan. Or doctors who write medical dramas. Lawyers who write courtroom dramas and whatnot.”

“It'll be like RRR and H for Hideo, so RRR HHH or RH RH RH, we should call it RH Games.”

“Since the pandemic has gotten somewhat better, I was planning to ask him to do some more music for us. And then this news came in.”

“Molly is just a little bit clumsy at life.”

“Of course, the reading part is fun too, but picking out the books, therein lies the fun.”

“But then, the distribution company contacted me saying that the movie was going to be released in Japan, and sent me a CD. Even though I already owned the CD.”

“It was my first time meeting Nicolas, and yet, from that moment on, after just 20 or 30 minutes of talking, I felt like he was a childhood friend, someone I had known from ages ago.”

“But I really wanted to put in an Asian character, and if I'm going to use an Asian actor, I wanted them to be Japanese because, well, um, I'm Japanese.”

“But it's meaningless if you lose your own colour in the process, so you have to find a place for yourself among the symphony but bring out the Japanese part of yourself too. Like, you can hear a Japanese flute from within the symphony.”

“But I don't remember exactly how we first met. I feel like I've known him from ages ago.”

Kojima's debut as a voice actor — his first time voicing a character in an animated film — was in the Japanese dub of Zootopia 2 (Zootrópolis 2), in which he voices Paul Molebrandt, nicknamed the Mole, a minor IT department employee at the Zootopia Police Department; the Japanese release was 5 December 2025. Recalling his participation in Zootopia 2 on KOJI10, Kojima said he was not told which character he would voice until he arrived for the recording.

Kojima read Akira Otani’s “Rurika, Born 2019, Turns 50” in one sitting. He said that, having grown up reading Koontz and McCammon, he felt a sense of nostalgia as he turned the pages. He explained that the novel’s tone was closer to shonen manga and anime than to the “modern horror” that took his generation by storm in the 1980s, and that it had Otani’s distinctive storytelling style. He said that, in contrast to the countless twentieth-century works of science fiction inspired by fear of a “population explosion,” the novel takes a meta perspective on life after retirement in Japan’s super-aged society.