After the Tohoku earthquake, fans and associates from around the…

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.

In October 2011, Kojima interpreted the chain of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in Tohoku as more than a natural disaster: a human failure born of scorn for nature. He maintained that a true resurrection must not simply rebuild the previous world, but choose a new, untrodden course that does not reproduce the memes of envy, hatred, and vengeance.

Before becoming a designer, Kojima turned to stories as a compass when he doubted his future: experiencing unfamiliar times and places expanded his world and refined his outlook. When he was able to make a living from creating, he changed his relationship with stories and began thinking about how to connect his works with players and the world; he said he wanted to push those who were standing still, help them move forward, and make the world better.

“There were a lot of surprises - the way the Western developers do things are so different! What I'm thinking now is, OK, we need to be a global studio.”

One year after March 11, Kojima remained distressed by the earthquake and radioactive contamination: he feared that Japan could disappear as a nation and that he could lose his sense of belonging as a Japanese person. That anxiety led him back to Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy to ask what it means to lose one’s homeland.