Summer may be over for all of you who live in the northern hemisphere, but we’ve got a feature ready for you soon to help you keep the summer vibes going as the days get shorter. We are going to publish a huge career spanning interview with Mr. Kaz Ayabe, the developer behind it Bokunatsu (I summer vacation) series that has been helping us enjoy the seasonal sunshine for over two and a half decades with games like Attack of the Friday Monsters, Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation and most recently Natsu-Mon: Summer of the 20th Century Child .
To whet your appetite for an upcoming Nintendo Life interview, we’ve pulled an interesting tidbit from our conversation with Ayabe-san that details the origins of his studio’s name, Millennium Kitchen.
The company was founded in 1997, so you might expect the name to be inspired by the Y2K fever. However, as the famous developer discusses in our retrospective interview (hosted by James Mielke, no less), it’s actually a play on a Japanese saying:
NL: Where did the company name ‘Millennium Kitchen’ come from? You also opened a curry restaurant in Tokyo. Do you have a passion for food?
THE: Yes, I opened the curry shop by accident. Coincidentally, my company opened a curry shop. The company’s name, Millennium Kitchen, was inspired by an old Japanese saying—”kamado wo tsubusu.”
Kamado is “stove” or “kitchen” and Tsubusu means “crushed or broken”. We use this phrase when a big house, like a rich family, suddenly goes bankrupt. I mother’s father, or my grandfather, supplied fishing nets to the fishing industry in Otaro, Hokkaido. There used to be a lot of herring in the area, and his job was making herring nets. Fishing was a very successful business in the 1920s. Around the 1950s, the herring disappeared and his business collapsed – he “crushed his kitchen”. So I named my studio Millennium Kitchen in the hope that my kitchen would last a thousand years.
NL: It’s always cool to know the inspiration behind a name. This is a very nuanced reason behind the name of your studio.
THE: By the way, when I first started working with Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, the person in charge of the Sony Computer contract said, “Here’s another company with a strange name.” [laughs] There are many Sony Computer developers with strange company names.
NL: Like NanaOn-Sha and MuuMuu?
THE: that’s right.
So there you have it. 1000 years is a long time, but we really hope that Ayabe-san will be cooking holiday treats for a long time to come.
The upcoming Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town is the next project he’s involved in — look out for our full interview soon where he talks about that and much, much more.
