Random How Kaz Ayabe's Millennium Kitchen Got Its Name

[admin]

​

Summer may be over for all you Northern Hemisphere dwellers, but we've got a bumper feature in store for you very soon that'll keep the summer vibes alive as days grow shorter. We'll be publishing an enormous career-spanning interview with Mr. Kaz Ayabe, the developer behind the Bokunatsu (My Summer Vacation) series who's been helping us enjoy the seasonal sunshine for more than two and a half decades now with games like Attack of the Friday Monsters, Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation, and most recently Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid.

To whet your appetite for Nintendo Life's upcoming interview, we've pulled an interesting nugget from our conversation with Ayabe-san which details the origins of his studio's name, Millennium Kitchen.

The firm was set up in 1997, so you might expect the name was inspired by Y2K fever. However, as the famed developer discusses in our retrospective interview (conducted by one James Mielke, no less), it's actually a play on a Japanese saying:

NL: Where does the company name 'Millennium Kitchen' come from? You also opened a curry restaurant in Tokyo. Do you have a passion for food?
KA: Yes, I opened a curry shop by chance. It's a coincidence that my company opened a curry shop. The company name, Millennium Kitchen, was inspired by an old Japanese saying—"kamado wo tsubusu."
Kamado is "furnace" or "kitchen" and Tsubusu means "crushed or broken." We use this phrase when a big house, like a wealthy family, suddenly goes bankrupt. My mother's father, or my grandfather, used to supply fishing nets to the fishing industry in Otaru, Hokkaido. In the old days, 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 bust—he "crushed his kitchen." So I named my studio Millennium Kitchen in hopes that my kitchen will last a thousand years.

NL: It's always cool knowing the inspiration behind a name. That's a very nuanced reason behind your studio's name.
KA: 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 weird name." [laughs] There are a lot of Sony Computer developers with weird company names.
NL: Like NanaOn-Sha and MuuMuu?
KA: That's right.

So there you have it. 1000 years is a long old time, but we very much hope that Ayabe-san will keep on cooking up holiday treats for a long time yet.

The upcoming Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town is the next project he's involved in — keep an eye out soon for our full interview feature where he discusses that and much, much more.