Kojima, raised in Kansai, says he loves Osaka's takoyaki and Kobe's…

As his eldest son grew, Kojima stopped visiting Kamakura and likewise became too lazy to go back to Kobe; Umimachi Diary reminded him of what he had lost and what he must not forget. At the end of that summer he went to Hayama with his younger son, and from the train saw the sea where he had played with his father and where he had gone with his first son, and he decided to resume that diary of outings when the younger son is old enough.

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.

“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.”

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 a child Kojima’s family nicknamed him “Dekoppachi” because his forehead was prominent like Ataro’s younger brother; he did not entirely like the nickname but did not hate it either. He went on to draw Akatsuka’s characters everywhere, and from around third grade he drew Bakabon’s dad repeatedly—in notebooks, textbooks, his diary, on desks and on school walls; he learned to draw the character with his eyes closed, continued adding the dad to some autograph boards, and believed it was the character he had drawn more times than any other.