“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.”
Kojima said the story of Policenauts came to him in the 1990s in response to two things: the release of the movie Rising Sun and the outburst of “japan bashing” it caused, and the public debate over organ transplantation and problems associated with people who had suffered brain death injuries; he added that in 1990 Toyohiro Akiyama was the first Japanese person to go into space and that they suddenly began to be able to read NASA documents never published in Japan before, containing information about the effects of weightlessness and how it feels to travel to space, and that his friends and family talked about it.
“Also, in 1990 Toyohiro Akiyama was the first Japanese person to go into space, and we were suddenly getting to read a lot of amazing NASA documents that had never been published in Japan before.”