I.
TIME: How did you get started designing games?
Tajiri: I’m part of the first generation who grew up with manga and animation, you know, after Godzilla.
Pokémon cocreator Satoshi Tajiri, 1999 Time Magazine interview
By placing the beginning of his career in the shadow of Godzilla, Satoshi Tajiri offers something more insightful than his simple boyish love for the giant monster. As the first postwar Japanese character to achieve international success, Godzilla helped pave the way for the Japanese culture industry that made something like Pokémon possible.
Godzilla, who made his film debut less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, embodies a specifically Japanese fear of nuclear warfare. Film critics have analyzed how specific scenes in Gojira (1954) evoke Japanese naval defeats in World War II, the firebombing of Tokyo, the aftermath of the atomic bombings and postwar nuclear testing in the Pacific. That first film ends with Godzilla destroyed by an even more powerful superweapon, and the warning that further nuclear testing could awaken other monsters.
Godzilla also embodies a more universal dragon archetype that, as Borges writes, proves its necessity to the human imagination by reappearing again and again throughout history. Indeed, the remote islanders’ Godzilla myth told in Gojira bears a striking resemblance to the legend of St. George. In both cases, a young maiden is offered as a sacrifice to appease the dragon after previous animal sacrifices fail to end its reign of terror. I would certainly attribute much of Godzilla’s global popularity (especially among children completely ignorant of the atomic bomb) to how well he fills the dragon-shaped hole in the collective imagination.
Thus Godzilla first appeared in United States just two years later, in a dubbed, reedited version titled Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), with new scenes featuring American actor Raymond Burr. (This film was released in France the next year, selling more than 800,000 tickets.) By the early 1960s Tokyo had begun tailoring the Godzilla films to American and international audiences, pitting Godzilla against American cinema’s most famous giant monster in King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) and producing both Japanese- and English-language versions of the film.
Godzilla’s popularity among both Japanese and international children led to a softening of his character. Instead of symbolizing the horrors of nuclear war, Godzilla became a family-friendly hero, earth’s defender against alien invaders. This in turn made him much more commercial viable. Well before development began on Pokémon, consumers could rent Godzilla movies on VHS, play Godzilla video games, watch Godzilla cartoons on tv, buy plastic Godzilla toys and listen to the Blue Öyster Cult song.
And, of course, by the time Godzilla starred in video games Hello Kitty, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and the Mario Bros. were walking in his gigantic footsteps.
Tajiri’s identification as a member of the first manga and anime generation is equally important. First, like Godzilla, anime found international success in the 1960s and 1970s. If you’re around my age, your parents could very well have found memories of watching Speed Racer, Gigantor or Astro Boy in their childhoods. (Manga would have to wait a few more decades for mainstream English-language popularity.)
Second, the rise of anime and manga offers a clear — and clearly Japanese — example of a still ongoing cultural and economic trend that fueled Pokémon’s success. In The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, cultural historian Steven Watts argues that the Disney Company’s synergistic use of multiple media to build its brand greatly contributed to a broader “commercialization of leisure,” the transformation of leisure from a hobby or activity to spend time on to a product for sale. If you want a 2022 illustration of this, just think of how often specific brand names come up when you ask a friend or colleague what they did over the weekend, names like Netflix, Xbox, Instagram, Peloton and of course Disneyland. (For another example, consider the extent to which dating has become a group of online subscription services, each with its own target market.)
While the commercialization of leisure has undoubtedly changed the lives of adults, it has completely transformed the lives of children. Of course, cultures throughout time have had children’s toys and games, but the concept of children as a specific market is relatively recent. As discussed in the introduction to this series, for example, the teddy bear — perhaps the quintessential commercial child’s toy — only dates back to the Teddy Roosevelt administration at the turn of the twentieth century. Similarly, children’s literature as a distinct genre only dates back to the 19th century; America’s most prestigious children’s book awards, the Newberry and Caldecott medals, were first awarded in 1922 and 1937, respectively.
Manga, Donald Richie writes in “Japan and the Image Industry,”
tell simple stories in the manner of comic strips everywhere. But only in image-conscious Japan has such a flourishing of ‘comics culture’ become the most significant feature of Japanese mass culture.
It is estimated that 70 percent of people riding public transportation in the country are looking at manga, that these make up 40 percent of all publication in Japan, and that in one year alone (1995, the height of the manga boom) nearly two billion such collections were purchased. That figure equates to fifteen copies for every resident of the country.
This essay has several points of interest for us. “Image industry” is a vivid, succinct description of our world of commercialized leisure. I cannot recall a time in my life when a child-consumer would have been unable to ask his or her parents to buy a multitude of products bearing the image of a favorite movie or cartoon character: toys, video games, t-shirts, backpacks, breakfast cereals, pajamas, piñatas, school supplies. (I would push back against Richie’s argument that Japan’s image industry is culturally unique or more prominent than in other countries, as the images of Mickey Mouse, Spider-Man and Darth Vader are as commercially ubiquitous as those of any anime or manga character.)
Noting that the 1950s saw both manga and television become omnipresent in Japan, Richie argues that these two product-activities fed into each other, describing manga as “a slow but portable TV;” as elsewhere in the world, the young Japanese child-consumer grows up with “omnipresent” diversions. Richie concludes by arguing that the image industry consumption squeezes out other creative and imaginative activities. “It imagines for us,” he writes, “and presents us with an image that is not intended for any single individual but for everyone… its standard image precludes all others and insists on a single, standardized model. It is this that it sells.”
Richie wrote this essay in 1996, the year the first Pokémon games were released to little immediate success. Had he waited a year he may have chosen a different illustration of the image industry’s power to commercialize leisure: students and commuters with their eyes glued not to manga but to Game Boy screens.
II.
Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one – that’s what Pokémon is.
Tajiri, 1999 Time interview
Born in 1965, Satoshi Tajiri grew up in a rapidly changing Japan. Tokyo had hosted the Summer Olympics the previous year, an event intended to symbolize the country’s postwar recovery and return to the global community. Like many Olympic Games since, Tokyo 1964 was the occasion for massive infrastructure investments, such as new Tokyo metro lines and the world’s first bullet train.
In Japan, these investments were just one part of a much broader trend of industrial and economic development, which historian James L. McClain calls “an era of economic growth that was to astound the world.” Japan had experienced an almost miraculous recovery from the rubble of World War II, boasting the world’s fifth largest gross national product (GNP) by the time of the 1964 Olympics. Then growth accelerated even further. “Throughout the 1960s,” McClain writes in Japan: A Modern History,
The economy expanded at an average rate of more than 10 percent a year, and before the decade was over, Japan’s output of goods and services surpassed that of West Germany — and every other free market economy in the world except that of the United States.
Japanese real household incomes, he continues, quadrupled between 1955 and the early 1970s. (Much of this economic growth was fueled by the export-focused megacorporations whose products you probably have in your home or garage: Sony, Nikon, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Hitachi, Nissan, Honda, Toyota.) When he first visited Japan in 1966, McClain himself had a strong first impression of prosperity. “It was difficult not to be impressed with the affluence that I saw around me,” he writes in the preface to his book, “with the towering new buildings and clean streets, or with the fact that everything seemed to work so well.”
It was also a period of rapid urbanization; only 38 percent of Japan’s population lived in cities in 1950, compared to 72 percent in 1972. Donald Richie vividly describes this changing landscape in his autobiographical essay “Japan: Half a Century of Change,” which begins with Richie leaving the Navy to take a civilian role in the U.S. occupation and tracks how Japan’s continued transformation forced him to continually challenge his own assumptions about its culture. During the 1950s, for instance, his view of Mt. Fuji from the Ginza crossing “completely disappeared, covered by layer after layer of new buildings,” while his old neighborhood was “flattened to make room for a new high rise.” During the 1970s, Richie realized that “tradition apparently covered much less territory than I originally estimated:”
I, who sort of believed in ancestor worship, even if the Japanese did not, was thus surprised when I saw the Shiba Tokugawa tombs raised to make way for the Prince Hotel. And I, who thought that a cozy, symbiotic relationship existed between Japan and nature, reacted with alarm when I saw the coastline being concreted over, forests cut down to accommodate golf courses, and national park land given over to developers.
Satoshi Tajiri saw this transformation first-hand. He grown up in Machida City, a small town that, like many other small towns, was swallowed up into the Tokyo megalopolis. It was still rural during Tajiri’s childhood. “There were rice paddies, rivers, forests,” he told Time in 1999. “It was full of nature.” As previously mentioned, young Tajiri, or ‘Dr. Bug’ to his neighborhood friends, loved exploring the local forests and rivers in search of various insects. After the rapid urbanization of his teenage years, these lost natural spaces became profoundly nostalgic memories for Tajiri — nostalgia in its true, original sense of longing for a lost or distant home, not just in our current, water-downed sense of fondly remembering something from childhood. “Every year they would cut down trees,” Tajiri told Time. “The population of insects would decrease. The change was so dramatic. A fishing pond would become an arcade center.”
Pokémon’s first generation takes place in a fictionalized, undeveloped version of Japan’s Kanto region: Mt. Moon takes the place of Mt. Akagai; Vermilion City of Yokohama; Saffron City of Shinjuku, Tokyo; Cinnabar Island of the volcanic island Izu Oshima. When designing the games’ map, Tajiri moved Pallet Town, a fictionalized version of Machida, from its actual position in urban Tokyo to the less developed and more idyllic Shizuoka Prefecture near Mt. Fuji.
Pokémon’s nostalgia for a rural, small town Japan — seen through the eyes of a child — is not unique among Japanese video games. As I’ll discuss a bit later on, Tajiri’s future mentor Shigeru Miyamoto drew on his childhood memories of exploring the Japanese countryside when designing The Legend of Zelda (1986), giving the series a rustic flavor it has had ever since. (Think of the bucolic, almost Shire-like opening sections of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.) Similarly, the Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing series provide escapes into safe, friendly, whimsical, brightly colored cartoon versions of rural Japan. In fact, the most recent Animal Crossing game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020), became a massive escapist hit during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, further demonstrating the widespread appeal of this specific nostalgic flavor.
Margaret Blount discusses a similar development in British literature in her book Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction. In both cases, the destruction of real rural spaces through industrialization and urbanization encouraged the imagining of increasingly idealized rural fantasy worlds. Her description of The Wind in the Willows (1908) and similar books resonates with my memories of playing the first Animal Crossing on GameCube almost twenty years ago:
a delicate art form not given to extravagant fantasy but the description of an idealized rural life full of pleasing, holiday amusement and that ‘adorableness’ of miniature beauty that makes a baby hedgehog seem both comic and magic at the same time.
Inhabited by anthropomorphic yet childlike animals, these artificial Edens omit both the violent predation and frequent death of real animal life and the various social, psychological, financial, moral and medical complexities of adult human life. “Nostalgia is always with us,” she writes, and she identifies a primary, reoccurring nostalgic object in words relevant to Satoshi Tajiri, or Walt Disney, decades earlier, or pandemic players of Animal Crossing as well as to Kenneth Grahame or A.A. Milne — “a countryside populated by small, indigenous animals is many people’s wish, hope and memory.” In order for this fantasy to give “imaginative satisfaction,” she continues, it “has to be happy and romanticized.”
III.
Japan, which once purveyed Judo, sushi and Zen to the world, and then turned more palpable with cars and cameras, now began exporting manga, anime and the more flashy kinds of pop culture. Since this latter does not make nearly as much money as cars or cameras, there is no mention of trade barriers. And indeed there are none. Mickey Mouse is welcomed so long as Hello Kitty is reciprocally admitted.
Donald Richie, “Crossing the Border: The Japanese Example”
In 1974, Sanrio, which began life as the Yamanashi Silk Company, started selling a vinyl coin purse featuring a mouthless white cartoon cat named Hello Kitty, a character whose meteoric rise to international popularity surprised even the company’s founder. “We’ve introduced more than 420 characters,” Shintaro Tsuji told reporters in 1999 for Hello Kitty’s 25th anniversary. “But Hello Kitty is the only one that has survived. If you ask me why, I don’t even know. I guess because she’s cute.”
Hello Kitty became a Japanese and then global moneymaker, appearing on more products than I could possibly list here; a 2010 press release for Sanrio’s 50th anniversary mentions “over 50,000 Sanrio-branded items… sold in 70 countries around the world.” Hello Kitty surpassed $1 billion in global sales by the turn of the millennium. Tama New Town, Tokyo, is home to a Hello Kitty theme park. Taiwan is home to a Hello Kitty-themed maternity hospital with pink and white décor and the cartoon cat’s face on walls, statues, blankets, pillows and nurses’ aprons.
Hello Kitty proved that there was a massive global market for kawaii, a specifically Japanese kind of cuteness. (I will explore this concept more in an upcoming post on Clefairy and Jigglypuff.)
Four years later, Taito released a game very different than the Pong and Breakout derivatives that abounded in the arcades of the mid-1970s: Space Invaders. Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, this unwinnable game — the aliens always shoot the player down in the end — became an unprecedented hit in Japan, an arcade game so popular that it caused a nationwide shortage of the 100-yen coins used to play it. It found almost as much success in the United States, where importer Midway sold more than 60,000 arcade machines within a year.
For our purposes, Space Invaders is important for two main reasons. As the first internationally successful Japanese video game, it paved the way for the Japanese games which would dominate the golden age of arcades — Pac-Man (1980), Donkey Kong (1981), Frogger (1981), clear Space Invaders derivatives such as Galaxian (1979) and Galaga (1981) — and which would in turn pave the way for the continued Japanese success in the global home console market.
On a smaller scale, one of the many gamers enthralled with Space Invaders was a teenaged Satoshi Tajiri, who played the game in the arcade that replaced his local fishing pond. Tajiri would later agree with an interviewer’s characterization of him as a “Space Invaders junkie,” recalling that he skipped school to go to the arcade, causing a rift with his parents. “It was as sinful as shoplifting. My parents cried that I had become a delinquent.”
Equally fascinated by video games and frustrated with a lack of information on them, Tajiri decided to start his own video game magazine, Game Freak:
It was handwritten. I stapled the pages together. It had techniques on how to win games, secret tips for games like Donkey Kong… when I was 18 I already had a business going. At first I used a photocopy machine — more important than style was substance.
The teenaged writer-editor-publisher met a young, sympatico aspiring artist, Ken Sugimori, who agreed to become Game Freak’s illustrator; Sugimori, who has illustrated more Pokémon cards than any other artist, continues to lead the team that designs new Pokémon. (As you can see in the magazines above, Sugimori was heavily influenced by Dragon Ball writer-artist Akira Toriyama.)
For his part, Tajiri decided that, instead of going to college or, as his father wished, becoming an electrical utility repairman, he would pursue a career in video games.
IV.
Back when we were first making the games… we could hardly even be called a company at the time. We were just almost like a college club or something, where people who were interested would just gather and hang out. They’d come to work whenever they want, leave whenever they want. Some people would be sleeping over, because they worked so hard into the night.
Junichi Masuda, Chief Creative Fellow, The Pokémon Company
Like the French New Wave, Pokémon began with a group of dissatisfied critics deciding to step into the creative arena themselves. “The more I learned about games,” Tajiri recalled in 1999, “the more frustrated I became because the games weren’t very good. I could tell a good game from a bad game. My conclusion was: let’s make our own games.” So Game Freak the video game zine became Game Freak the game developer. Tajiri and Sugimori were joined by musician and programmer Junichi Masuda, who remains with The Pokémon Company and continues to compose the games’ soundtracks.
“We were really true indies at the time,” Masuda told Games Informer writer Kyle Hilliard in 2017, “just friends doing a hobby.” Game Freak set their sights on making games for their era’s most successful console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES.) Masuda would later recall that
when we first started making the games we didn’t really have any official development equipment, so we just sort of had to hack the NES and figure out how it worked so we could develop on it ourselves without the official sort of development tools.
While I lack the space to fully explore the success and impact of the NES, ground well-trodden by video game historians, I will mention two NES games that had a particular influence on Pokémon. As a devoted fan of Shigeru Miyamoto since Donkey Kong, Tajiri would have undoubtedly played his idol and future mentor’s The Legend of Zelda (1986), a game that, like Pokémon, takes inspiration from a rural Japanese childhood. “I spent a lot of my time playing in the rice paddies and exploring the hillsides and having fun outdoors,” Miyamoto told NPR in 2015.
There's a place near Kobe where there's a mountain, and you climb the mountain, and there's a big lake near the top of it. We had gone on this hiking trip and climbed up the mountain, and I was so amazed — it was the first time I had ever experienced hiking up this mountain and seeing this big lake at the top. And I drew on that inspiration when we were working on the Legend of Zelda game and we were creating this grand outdoor adventure where you go through these narrowed confined spaces and come upon this great lake.
With Pokémon, Tajiri would try to translate his own childhood memories of exploration and discovery into video game experiences.
1986 also saw the release of Dragon Quest (known as Dragon Warrior in North America), the first Japanese RPG or JRPG. Created by Yuji Horii and featuring characters designed by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame, the NES game sold approximately 1.5 million copies in Japan and 500,000 in North America. Until 2020, when Dragon Quest XI sold 6 million copies worldwide, the series was a domestic hit that never quite achieved the international success of Pokémon or The Legend of Zelda. Dragon Quest II (1987) sold 2.4 million copies in Japan; Dragon Quest III (1988) sold 3.8 million; the series as a whole has sold more than 84 million games, with every single game selling at least 1 million copies in Japan. In a precursor to Pokémania, the Dragon Quest III hype generated more than a million sales its first day of release, as well as the truancy arrests of hundreds of schoolchildren who skipped class to buy and play the game.
Dragon Quest established a template for future games in the JRPG genre, including Pokémon. Anyone who’s played both games can identify a heavy Dragon Quest influence on Pokémon Red and Blue, from healing potions to random encounters with monsters in the wilds outside of towns. Like Pokémon Red and Blue, Dragon Quest III begins with the hero waking up in his own bedroom and then talking to his mother, who tells him that it’s time to leave home and begin his adventure. Dragon Quest V (1992) actually featured the ability to tame wild monsters and add them to the player’s party. (Square Enix would return the compliment with Dragon Quest Monsters, a series of games frequently criticized as Pokémon rip-offs.)
As an unknown indie developer, Game Freak struggled to find a publisher for its first games. After several rejections, Namco published their first title, a puzzle game called Quinty (1989). While not a smash hit, Quinty was successful enough to get a North American release (as Mendel Palace) and, along with Tajiri’s persistence, opened doors at Nintendo. Tajiri got to meet and work with his idol Miyamoto during the production of Yoshi (1991), Game Freak’s first project for Nintendo.
Game Freak continued to develop games for various publishers throughout the early and mid-1990s: Smart Ball (1991), published by Sony for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES); Magical Taruruto (1992) and Pulseman (1994) published by Sega for the Genesis; Mario & Wario (1993), published by Nintendo for the SNES. But the team poured most of its creative energy into a side project during those years.
The image that comes to my mind is that of young Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks and a handful of collaborators in the last days of silent film, working on their last contractually obligated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons during working hours and creating the first adventures of a new character, Mickey Mouse, in their spare time. (Of course, Game Freak had a much better, more supportive relationship with Nintendo than Disney and co. had with producer Charles Mintz.) Like Mickey, Pokémon would combine inspiration from a variety of sources — popular culture, personal nostalgia, new technological possibilities — with whimsy and personality to create something with global appeal.
Bibliography
Books
Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children's Fiction. 1974. Avon, 1977.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Imaginary Beings. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. 1974. Vintage, 2002.
DeMaria, Russel, and Johnny L. Wilson. High Score! The Illustrated History of Electronic Games. 2nd ed., McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004.
Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games. Prisma Publishing, 2001.
McClain, James L. Japan: A Modern History. Norton, 2002.
Richie, Donald. A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan. Stone Bridge Press, 1992.
Richie, Donald. Viewed Sideways: Writings on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan. Stone Bridge Press, 2011.
Ryan, Jeff. Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. Portfolio Penguin, 2011.
Thompson, Jason. Manga: The Complete Guide. Del Ray, 2007.
Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Newspaper, Magazine and Internet Articles
Bagan, Hasi and Yoshiki Yamagata. “Landsat analysis of urban growth: How Tokyo became the world's largest megacity during the last 40 years.” Remote Sensing of Environment, Vol. 12, December 2012.
Carr, Austin. “Reflecting on a Year Spent on Virtual Islands in Animal Crossing and Fortnite.” Bloomberg, 7 June 2021.
Chua-Eoan, Howard, and Tim Larimer. "Beware of the Pokemania." Time, November 22, 1999.
Ebert, Roger. “Idiotic? Yes, but 'Godzilla' reflects its nuclear times.” RogerEbert.com, 2 July 2004.
Fass, Allison. “Ventures: Miss Kitty Sashays into Times Square.” New York Times, 3 December 2000.
Frank, Allegra. “Pokémon Veteran Junichi Matsuda Reflects on the Series’ Early Days.” Polygon, 28 Sep. 2018.
Gerstmann, Jeff. “Dragon Warrior Monsters Review.” Gamespot, 7 February 2000.
“Hello baby! Hello Kitty welcomes Taiwan newborns.” Reuters, 5 December 2008.
Hilliard, Kyle. "Game Freak's Origins and its Pre-Pokémon Games." Game Informer, Aug. 9 2017.
--. "Here's How Game Freak Designs Pokémon Creatures." Game Informer, Aug. 10 2017.
Hollis, Daniel. “‘Dragon Quest XI’ has passed 6 million total sales, new trailer released.” NME, 24 September 2020.
Kalata, Kurt. “The History of Dragon Quest.” Gamasutra, 4 February 2008.
Khan, Imad. “Why Animal Crossing Is the Game for the Coronavirus Moment.” New York Times, 7 April 2020.
Larimer, Tim and Takashi Yokota. "The Ultimate Game Freak." Time, Nov. 22 1999.
Lev, Michael A. “Fads May Come and Go… But Endearing Hello Kitty Endures.” Chicago Tribune, 18 January 2000, p.5.1.
Mills, Don. “Hello Kitty, Goodbye Cash.” National Post, 4 February 1999.
Miyamoto, Shigeru. “Q&A: Shigeru Miyamoto on The Origins of Nintendo's Famous Characters.” NPR, 19 June 2015.
Parker, Ginny. “Japanese Consumers Corner Market on Cute Characters.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 19 Dec. 1999, p.25.
Ryfle, Steve. “Reign of Destruction.” Criterion Collection, 24 October 2019.
Tabuchi, Hiroko. “In Search of Adorable, As Hello Kitty Gets Closer to Goodbye.” New York Times, 15 May 2010, p.B1.
Varley, Melinda. “HELLO KITTY: Can Hello Kitty Continue to Rule the World?” Brand Strategy 23 Feb 2009, pp. 32-36
Author’s Note:
This is the first of three posts on the history of Pokémon’s first generation. The second will cover the games’ development and the third and last will cover the series’ rapid expansion from two Game Boy games into a global multimedia empire; posts on Pikachu, Clefairy & Jigglypuff, and Vulpix & Ninetales are also in the pipeline, so to speak.
In the interest of being realistic I will be switching from weekly to biweekly posts, with something new on the first and third Wednesday of every month.
I like how you ground these cultural icons into their context. Like the nostalgia for rural Japan shown in Pokemon, super interesting.
II.
Very interesting. For me this also contextualizes Miyazaki's wonderful Princess Mononoke, where the conflict between nature and urbanization stands at the center. The film, however, looks at nature not nostalgically but, how should I put it, dialectically vis-à-vis the human city.
III.
A little editorial note, I wish I could tuck it discretely somehow: "(I will explore this concept more in an upcoming post on Clefairy and Jigglypuff.)" I suppose you have done so in Clefairy, which I didn't read yet; it does not appear in the one on Jigglypuff.