Kojima placed his first love at age four in Anne Yuri, the only…

Upon learning that Yuriko Hishimi would attend the premiere of a Mamoru Oshii film, Kojima wrote to Kenji Kamiyama pleading that he introduce him to her. Onstage at the premiere, Oshii confessed through a megaphone his own youthful love for Anne, and Kojima felt relieved, as if Oshii were speaking for him; although Kojima did not get to speak with Hishimi backstage, after forty years he saw his first love as a real woman, and at age forty-four he wrote the essay as the love letter he should have mailed forty years earlier.

Kojima bought the 2005 DVD release of Bohachi Bushido but could not finish it because seeing Yuriko Hishimi naked conflicted with the image of Anne he had built up from his childhood crush. A 1997 book, A Letter to Anne, finally allowed him to look at nude photographs and accept that the character Anne and the actress Yuriko Hishimi were part of the same first love; from that point on he began to say this openly in interviews.

“Your name will be Seventeen. […] There'll be an oi oi button. If the players press that, they get a like. But they have to press it at just the right timing.”

“You may be playing the hero in the video game, but what if the girl you were in relationship with called you to ask stuff like, 'Do you like me?' or 'Don't you remember me?' We never had a character like that.”

Kojima recalled that when his son was small they did all kinds of activities and trips together, but that abruptly ended when his son started junior high and preferred to be with his friends. Since Kojima's own father died when he was thirteen and he had no experience of going through adolescence with a father, he said he did not know what closeness or distance to adopt with his son; he sought guidance by rereading Early Autumn.