Summer may be over for all of us in the Northern Hemisphere, but we’ve got a cool feature coming soon to keep you in the summer spirit as the days get shorter. We’re publishing a career-spanning interview with Kaz Ayabe, the developer behind Bokunatsu (My summer vacation) series has been keeping us enjoying the seasonal sunshine for over two and a half decades now with games like Attack of the sixth monster, Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacationand most recently Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Boy.
To whet your appetite for Nintendo Life’s upcoming interview, we’ve included an interesting tidbit from our conversation with Ayabe-san, which details the origin of his studio name, Millennium Kitchen.
The company was founded in 1997, so you might assume the name was inspired by the Y2K craze. However, as the famous developer discussed in our retrospective interview (conducted by James Mielke), 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. Are you passionate about food?
KA: Well, I happened to open a curry shop. It just so happened that my company opened a curry shop. The company name, Millennium Kitchen, was inspired by an old Japanese saying—”kamado wo tsubusu.”
Kamado means “furnace” or “stove” and Tsubusu means “to be crushed or broken.” We use this phrase when a large house, like a wealthy family, suddenly goes bankrupt. My mother’s grandfather, or my grandfather, used to supply fishing nets to the fishing industry in Otaru, Hokkaido. Back in the day, there were a lot of herring in the area and his business was making herring nets. Fishing was a very successful business in the 1920s. Around the 1950s, the herring disappeared and his business went bankrupt—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 nice to know the inspiration behind a name. There’s a subtle reason behind your studio name.
KA: By the way, when I first started working with Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, the person in charge of the contract with Sony Computer said, “This is another company with a strange name.” [laughs] There are a lot of Sony computer developers with strange company names.
NL: Do you like NanaOn-Sha and MuuMuu?
KA: That’s right.
Well, that’s it. 1000 years is a long time, but we really hope that Ayabe-san will continue to cook holiday dishes for a long time to come.
Upcoming Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town is the next project he’s involved in — stay tuned for our full interview for more information on this project and more.
