I think it was when I was at elementary school; all the blank spaces of my textbooks were covered with scribbles and drawings. I drew flipbook manga on them, played with the photos of the authors, making their mouths move like paper puppets, and cut out the illustrations to make them look like pop-up books. I very much enjoyed playing with my textbooks.

I'm using an ordinary PC, as all I need is word processing software. The reason I chose it was…because it was what my company provided for me.

I want a word processor that prevents me from avoiding working, helps me to concentrate, and gently motivates me to work. Then I can work twice as much as I do now.

am always thinking about how to make games a surprising, pleasing and enjoyable experience for the people who play them. As a designer, I try to keep in mind what I enjoy about playing games and use it to provide a better game experience for players. I think that it is conventionality that most often blocks my free conception and so my current theme is to challenge it.

t is always hard to decide the basic style of a game. My proposals are usually relatively undeveloped ideas, and the time that it takes to develop them slows the process by which they are turned into actual games. I think that if I could make proposals more logically, I could avoid this problem… I think that it is natural to be careful about the main body of a work, so I think it is therefore important to make sure I do not neglect the more trivial aspects of the game; I believe that the quality of the work will be totally different, depending on how much sense of fun can be expressed in the side details.

cannot really answer, because I don't understand the media arts myself… I think of my work as entertainment, rather than as art; I generally want people to be able to be casual and relaxed when playing games.

I would rather be thought of as an entertainer than as an artist. I express through my games what I find fun and interesting and what I would like to do. My aim is to please all the customers playing my games, as their enjoyment is my greatest reward. I consider it my mission to produce innovative games about which people will say "there is no other game that compares to this."

As I usually work by instinct, I don?'t really have anything definite like a motto.

I am most often inspired by the interesting work of others. Once I leave my office to go home, I delete everything about work from my mind, so that when I watch movies and listen to music, I can simply enjoy them. When I return to work, I make use if anything I recall that inspired me.

Like the other games I have produced, ÕKAMI is not the result of solely my own efforts. Rather, it was made possible through the collaboration of an excellent team of talented game designers. In the future, I only wish to continue producing interesting games with such highly motivated and skilled people.

The video games I played in my childhood and student life. I don't know the reason, but I was strongly influenced by the arcade games I played when I was at elementary school, particularly by their primitive computer generated graphics and sounds. I am still attracted by those "beep-beep" sounds and rough pixel art. In fact, I would like to one day have the opportunity to make a game in that old fashioned style. Unfortunately, it will be difficult to produce that kind of game…it is a pity for me.