body

“what will happen if humans go into space?, or what will be the influence of living in space on the human body and human relationships?”

“I mean, if you shoot someone the blood should be red colored. In the same way that a person who's been shot has to show a painful expression on their face. It's how you get people to recognize and understand that being shot with a gun actually IS painful.”

In 2003 Kojima produced and designed Boktai (Game Boy Advance), whose cartridge included a photometric light sensor; to charge the game's solar weapon the player had to take the Game Boy Advance outside into real daylight, which compelled playing outdoors and during the day.

“I actually had wanted to include a sensor that measured how your breath smelled too! I *really* wanted to add that! The enemies are vampires, right? So if you ate something garlic-y and breathed on the mic, they'd all die. (laughs) [...] "Guys, we have to do this!!" But the rest of the staff all hated the idea.”

“It resonated with me, given the loneliness that troubled me in my younger days, which is why it has a very special place in my heart. After I saw it I bought a jacket and a pair of boots to copy Robert De Niro. Needless to say, I did not get a mohawk.”

“Let your readers know that I'm married, with a son. Put that in boldface, all caps.”

Kojima said loneliness had accompanied him since childhood and reached its worst during his adolescence, even when he was surrounded by family, friends, school and activities. He described how a switch could flip in the middle of having fun, making the feeling stronger the more numerous the crowd was; at the end of the year, when the city was liveliest, he spent sleepless nights fearing that the loneliness might one day kill him.

As a child of working parents, Kojima wore his house key on a cord around his neck like a dog tag; it annoyed him when he did somersaults on the horizontal bar, but he wore it at all times. No one ever picked him up from school—even in rain, during a typhoon, or when he was sick—so he would unlock and enter an empty house, turn on the lights and the air conditioner or heater, and sometimes cry at his mother’s vanity or wander the streets to delay coming home.

With no VCR to pause the broadcast, Kojima, his brother and his father finished dinner and their baths before the nine o’clock showing, watched attentively without popcorn or candy, and sprinted during the commercials to be the first to get to the bathroom, sometimes following prearranged turns. Kojima did not know that Nagaharu Yodogawa’s commentaries were prerecorded and imagined the presenter was also waiting for the commercial break to go and stand at the toilet.

Kojima regarded the primary family form as a unit of four: his parents, his brother two years older, and himself. After moving from Tokyo toward Kansai, his parents built a house in 1970 in a new development in Hyogo, distant from grandparents and other relatives; Kojima’s father presented that house as where they were starting and from which their children could also begin. They did not have the typical suburban dog because Kojima’s mother had asthma.

Kojima placed his first love at age four in Anne Yuri, the only female member of the Ultra Guard in Ultraseven. A promotional photograph—which was not an actual scene from the episode—showed her brushing her hair unaware of an alien standing behind her; Kojima wanted to warn her, but also blushed and felt heat without understanding why. In the series finale he cried more at the thought of never seeing Anne again than at the hero’s departure or the end of the show.

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.

As a child, Kojima avoided weekly manga magazines because he hated their cheap paper and the red, green, orange, or yellow tints; he was especially repulsed by battered, discolored, finger‑smudged copies left in barbers, eateries, and hospital waiting rooms. He preferred to wait months to buy the single‑volume editions (tankobon), which were revised, neatly bound, and intended for permanent collection, and he said he maintained that preference into upper‑middle age.

Kojima said he could still draw Bakabon’s dad with his eyes closed. In junior high he filled the margins of his textbooks and notes with Maetel from Galaxy Express 999. In senior high he traced Cobra on the cover so many times that the edges of the tankobon turned black from the graphite of his pencil.

After leaving that screening into the warm rain of Shinjuku, Kojima saw skyscrapers and neon signs in various languages, heard sirens and foreign voices, and for a moment felt he was in the Los Angeles of 2019 imagined by Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott. He said he smelled Blade Runner in the air, touched it in the city, and felt it on his skin and in the warmth of a puddle.

“So I deliberately kind of matched myself and Old Snake. This is not just the message to the users, but also a message to the internal development staff as well; we've all been working for quite a long time, and I wanted to show that Hideo Kojima, at 45, still working in the spotlight - I wanted to show that to the staff!”

“I wanted the users to almost overlap their experience - to say, "I aged, Snake aged" - I wanted to express this feeling in MGS4.”

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.

When the first Walkman appeared, Kojima was in the first year of high school, lived in a household headed by his mother, and could not afford one. Two years later a classmate lent him a Walkman in class; on hearing "Habana Express" by Akira Terao he felt the voice inside his body, a three‑dimensional sound that enveloped him and seemed to filter into his sight, leaving him speechless, though he could only aspire to buy one someday.

During the 2010 world tour for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Kojima was trapped with twelve other people (thirteen total) in a freight elevator at Uniqlo Soho in New York City. They managed to open the elevator doors with their bare hands and found only the metal wall of the shaft because the car had stopped between floors; as people began pounding on the cabin the smell of panic spread and there was fear of running out of oxygen, and Kojima found himself thinking of elevator movies. An hour later a rescue team evacuated them by ladder through the top of the elevator car, and they escaped without injury.

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 noted that in the manga Kamen Rider does not use the mask to hide a secret identity but to conceal the scars of his cyborg surgery, scars that reappear with rage or sorrow. He interpreted the hero as an artificial monster who faces total isolation and who draws from that solitude the purpose to fight when no one else can defend peace and nature.

In high school, a childhood friend named Tatsuo bookmarked a passage about DATURA in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies, acted it out for Kojima, said it was “cool,” pressed the book against Kojima’s chest, and left. Kojima devoured the novel without stopping to eat or drink and described an extreme physical reaction—dizziness, pounding in his chest, nausea, and sexual arousal—caused by prose whose furious energy did not resemble images, sounds, or anything he had previously known.

In 2011 Kojima described his week as sleeping only four hours a night and spending the rest of each day working or in meetings; he said he himself regrets being away from his family so much, but tries to keep weekends free to spend with them.

From Hyoryu, Kojima concluded that the human body needs work and movement: the castaway who balances his diet, exposes himself to the sun, and keeps active survives where others fall ill after long periods of immobility. He thought this lesson also applied to modern urban life and that an idle, purposeless existence guided only by desire is not sustainable.

Kojima explained the realism of ’Salem’s Lot as arising from an almost eccentric accumulation of details about the town, enough for the reader to accept vampires without any explanation. He also praised two montage devices: a whole day narrated by jumping between the town’s inhabitants, and a final confrontation structured as hours advancing toward sunset—a countdown that made him sweat, hold his breath, and keep turning the pages.

Kojima joked that his aged eyes did not lessen the pleasure of I Spy because the battle is fought with the mind, not with visual acuity. Against search engines that hand you stores, movies, or books effortlessly, he defended the joy and catharsis of searching on your own and training the discernment needed to find something valuable.

When Kojima reached a point in his life where he no longer trusted that he knew his own mountain or purpose, an editor at Da Vinci recommended The Summit of the Gods. The thousand pages of its two volumes made him feel cold, suffocated, and longing for the suffering to stop, but after climbing those two paper mountains alongside the characters he was able to once again face his own purpose.

The scene in The Drifting Classroom where the protagonist has his appendix removed without anesthetic stayed so vividly with Kojima that every time he hears the word "appendix" he remembers the surgery and prays he never has to undergo it. He said that scene affected him more than the improvised femoral artery operation in Black Hawk Down.

“What I can say is that I've aged alongside Snake, and I've matured along with him. As long as there's a Snake in Metal Gear Solid, that Snake will always be a part of me, so I don't think I could ever do a Snake that's much younger than myself.”

Kojima said he entered high school unable to tell dogs from cats because he had never had either as a pet; not for lack of wanting one, but because his mother suffered from asthma. In his first summer of high school he picked Jennie by Paul Gallico despite not being a cat lover, and he suspected the title might have reminded him of Jaime Sommers from The Bionic Woman.

According to the book’s capsule, Project Itoh was hospitalized immediately after the meeting to plan the Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots novelization and wrote the entire manuscript from his hospital bed. He identified with Otacon and Raiden, chose Otacon as the narrator to project himself into the novel, and built the rest of the work from that decision.

Kojima linked the speed and quality of his work to teams small enough to let him walk through the studio, spot problems where they arise, and give directions directly. He compared that method to visiting bookstores: solutions do not come from an automatic search, but from his own judgment, which he must keep refining with his eyes, head, and body.

Kojima says one must live with one’s receptive antennae out and scanning in all directions, an exhausting attention to diverse stimuli. His process is to hold onto what sparks interest, turn it over in the mind, shape it, and bring it out into the world; the same material absorbed can reappear as an essay, lyrics, sound, performance, or a video game depending on the medium and the creator’s technique.

Before the release, Kojima compared playing Death Stranding to climbing Mt. Fuji alone: the effort can lead someone to question why they continue and to give up, but reaching the summit and seeing the sunrise validates the difficulty and can make them cry. He noted that someone who turns back before the summit does not reach that emotion.

“So Conan, do you want to be in the game? [...] We have a 3D scanner right there.”

“my father pushing me out on the ocean on a boat. It was so frightening. I still go into the ocean, and I dive from time to time, but I get really frightened about these big waves and big ocean animals.”

“In this world that has become so digital, you shine a light on the beauty and instincts of human beings as living creatures.”

“And in Mr. Rajamouli's films, the main characters always take their clothes off. Same with my games.”

“So when I drive, I get into accidents. Because I'm too distracted by my thoughts. […] I try to avoid driving whenever possible.”

“Yes, the process of going to the restroom. I don't really need to use the bathroom.”

“In Death Stranding, there is a beach where the time axis runs differently from the rest of the world. I feel like I'm living there.”

“As far as digital contents go, we basically only had a naked Norman, a naked Lou, a beach and a whale. And well, that reflected the state that Kojima Productions was in. We were naked.”

“I don't really tell people this, but about three years ago, I was ill for a little while. And during that time, Nicolas constantly sent me messages of encouragement.”

“I wouldn't say I'm collecting them, but if there's some sort of bonus item, I think my generation is just materialistic. I want my albums to come with something.”

“Yeah, I scanned myself the last time around. Not this time though. In the last game, I was the one that came out of the tar.”

“You're just watching my face though. What's the fun in that? I'm not an idol or anything. […] But when I checked the footage, all I saw was my belly and stuff like that.”

“We do it once like an air hug, where you hug from a distance. And then we do it again without the helmet.”

“I was roaming in the dark and you were like the beacon of light leading the way with your smile and everything.”

“Okay, now you cry [...] I have to get in the mood but in the whole suit.”

“My home was close to the sea, and it left a very strong impression on me.”

Kojima wrote that shaving every morning upon waking was a pleasant way to start the day, and that although he now wears a neat three-day stubble he still keeps that morning ritual of tidying it immediately after getting up.

For Death Stranding 2, Kojima wanted Sam (played by Norman Reedus) to have his hair and beard grow in real time, with the player shaving or cutting them at a mirror; he discarded the idea, among other reasons, because he did not want to harm a superstar like Reedus.

“I thought that I could never recover. I felt like I might not ever be able to create a game again.”

“When I see movies and get ideas, usually just talking to people, eating or walking, or maybe I'm in a bath, I come up with these ideas. So it's almost like a disease, I call it. Even when I'm talking with my family, in my head, I'm in a totally different world.”

At Lucca Comics & Games 2025, Kojima updated his old line about being made of film: he said that of the 70% of films he carries inside, 35% is made up of Italian cinema.

Kojima says he has a much more sensitive sense of smell than other people, to the point of sometimes feeling unwell from odors, and that when he rides his company's elevator he can sometimes identify who rode before him from the lingering scent.

“In 1970, there was the Osaka Expo. My parents gave me a small Ricoh camera ... That's how it all started.”

“My dad got me a watch when I was in 5th grade. ... It made me feel like an adult for the first time.”

“I can't live without cotton swabs. ... The cotton swabs at the hotels in the US and Europe are rather big. My ear canals are quite narrow. ... I hope this brand stays in business.”

“I think my sense of smell is more sensitive than most people. ... I can even tell who was in the elevator before me ... I know what perfumes my staff use. I'm like a dog, I guess. I keep it a secret of which perfume I use.”

“The game industry took a toll on my eyes. I started wearing glasses when I was about 30.”

“I'm not a fan of scarves. I don't like stuff around my neck. However, this neck gaiter is an exception. ... I received this neck gaiter back in the day, and I've been using it ever since. I keep it in my bag”

“We've been collaborating for a long time. We devised a few pairs that consolidates into one. In the past, we made one where the lenses open to the side. But they were unstable when it was windy. ... The visors that change color from "2001: A Space Odyssey" would be cool but hard to achieve.”

“Some people from around the world have started to cosplay as me. So, I've been considering switching to contacts. And maybe shave my beard.”

“I hate the cold ... I actually like winter. I don't like summer so much. Fall is my favorite season.”

“I made a cameo appearance in Episode 11 of TBS’s Sunday Theater drama, “VIVANT.” For the role, I took off my glasses, slicked my hair back, got into costume, and gave it my best, but it was decided that I looked “too young” to be the Superintendent General of the Metropolitan Police Department, and that “there are no real-life examples of one with a beard.” So they adjusted my appearance with CGI. See if you can spot me.”

Norman Reedus took a photo of Kojima in the cafeteria on the set of “The Walking Dead.” The photo also appears in Reedus’s photography book; Kojima said he still had some muscle back then.

“Then I'd like to experience weightlessness.”