Kojima began by identifying with the climber Joji Habu, who selects…

North Face made Kojima want to look away and run because of the physical weight of the tragedy, but he felt he had to keep watching because it had really happened. Still, he saw that the film prepared a traverse beyond the disaster: the account of a deadly ascent ultimately became a work about love and about the person one promises to return to.

Kojima said that making video games was his mountain: it pulled him away from his previous path and saved him. He noted that the medium was changing form, yet he resolved to keep climbing even if he had to abandon everything else—not because the mountain was already there, but precisely because it was not yet there.

Kojima admired that North Face shifted genres like mountain weather: what first appears to be a war movie becomes a mountaineering film, then a satire of the press, and finally a disaster movie. He emphasized a material contrast: the climbers quit the alpine infantry, assemble homemade equipment and bicycle the entire 700 kilometers because they could not afford train tickets, while the journalists arrive as tourists, dine in formal wear in an opulent heated hotel and watch through telescopes those who sleep in a tent and sip barley soup amid the storm.

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.

As head of a household, as a father, and as a person, Kojima aspired to be Akatsuka’s alter ego—Bakabon’s dad. He had already passed Bakabon’s dad’s age of forty-one and still felt unworthy of inheriting the name of “fool”: he wanted to reach a bare self in which genius and fool would no longer be opposites and where he could answer the world’s contradictions with the character’s “It’ll be fine.”