Tokyo

“I grew up in the countryside myself, so I used to love the commotion of the city… the rust, the crowded roadsides, the electric wires. I loved all that. But after I turned 30 or so, it started to get a little tiresome…”

“We talked movies on that staircase for hours. You said you didn't mind waiting if it was a movie you really wanted to see. I guessed then, that here's a guy with the same DNA as me.”

Kojima regarded the primary family form as a unit of four: his parents, his brother two years older, and himself. After moving from Tokyo toward Kansai, his parents built a house in 1970 in a new development in Hyogo, distant from grandparents and other relatives; Kojima’s father presented that house as where they were starting and from which their children could also begin. They did not have the typical suburban dog because Kojima’s mother had asthma.

Kojima's father, who had survived the Great Tokyo Air Raid and as a boy had wanted to join the navy, drank and built model ships; the family's bathroom "dry dock" held many wrecked Yamato models. Seeing the title on the TV listings, he forced Hideo to watch the premiere broadcast of Space Battleship Yamato on October 6, 1974, but the boy found it boring and from the following week secretly switched the channel to Army of the Apes; only the reruns shown at dinnertime later turned him into a fan.

The first screening of the Yamato movie in Tokyo fell on August 7, 1977, the day of Kojima’s father’s funeral. While handling related paperwork in Umeda with his mother, Kojima bought a presale movie ticket that included a poster and put up Starsha’s image on his bedroom wall. On the day Yamato opened in Kansai he took the first train, waited for hours in the sun in a very long line, and watched probably the third showing in a packed, fetid auditorium. There, for the first time since his father’s death, he was able to process the loss of the man who loved the Yamato.

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.

Kojima lived near the sea in Tsujido until he was three, and after returning to the nearby Tokyo area in 1996 he took his eldest son many times to the coastal towns of his memories. On one route in Enoshima they saw fish, ate rice with seafood and manju buns, rode the ESCAR toll escalator—which Kojima called a rip-off—returned by ferry and ended the day in a café: Kojima drank coffee, the boy had juice, and Southern All-Stars songs played in the background.

In 2012, while preparing to open Kojima Productions Los Angeles, Kojima envisioned the Tokyo and LA teams not as two separate sides but as a studio located in a third space between the two cities. He wanted a global goal to render location irrelevant and for the outcome to be not merely a patchwork of Japanese memes with something American, but a creation global in the truest sense.

“So Conan, do you want to be in the game? [...] We have a 3D scanner right there.”

VIZ's biographical note places Kojima's birth in Tokyo in 1963, his directorial debut with Metal Gear in 1987, the establishment of his independent studio Kojima Productions at the end of 2015, and the release of Death Stranding in 2019.

“I came to Tokyo in 1996, not too long after going through the Kobe earthquake. At that time, I was making a game called Policenauts, and when we were working on the Sega Saturn version, Mr. Mamoru Oshii and I met and had our first conversation.”

“But I think that actually going out, looking up at the sky and discovering your own shapes is the first step in creating lifelong impact.”

Kojima Productions’ Tokyo headquarters has a pure white lobby where a life‑size statue of Ludens, the studio’s mascot, greets visitors; inside the studio there is a movie theatre and a gallery space where Kojima’s body of work is presented like a museum exhibit.

“So, we could put audio on there, and now games could talk. No one had made anything with CD-ROMs yet.”

“We met before the pandemic, and he used some of my songs in the first episode [Death Stranding], but it was songs from my previous records. He used "Goliath" and "Pale Yellow" in the gameplay.”

“By the way, I'm developing this game called Snake's Revenge, but I know it's not the authentic Snake, so please create a new Snake game of your own.”