Kaden

Kaden

@Kaden

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Kaden
@Kaden

Inkonbini and Nagai Industries

Someone pointed out that Nagai Industries, the makers of the upcoming game InKonbiri is a studio in Japan and I took a look at it and started to see some weird things.

This is from their website. If you were a Japanese studio, this seems kinda a weird way to phrase things.

According to the Tokyo Sandbox website currently the only language it supports is English (Source)

Right now it says that the studio is headquartered in Tokyo Japan, and according to an interview by Microsoft there are only 8 people on the team, which is composed of people around the globe.

I also noted the "visited a Japanese convenient store for the first time" as an odd way of saying something.

Team . We’re a compact, diverse team of highly-skilled interactive entertainment creators, with Japanese video games and animation ingrained into our DNA. Operating from Tokyo, Japan, a multinational city with rich culture and exceptional quality of life, we’re employing the benefits of this location to create an authentic, inspiring workspace while facilitating prolific and fulfilling game creation process. At Nagai Industries, we don’t confine ourselves to specific genres or aesthetics, design with our audience in mind, and strongly believe in the clarity of vision. We’re building a collaborative, people-oriented environment based on the values of open communication, creative autonomy, and healthy work-life balance to deliver memorable entertainment products with unique artistic voice and strong appeal. Fully embraced remote work model allows us to welcome passionate developers from around the globe to join our studio. If you have an ambition to make games that defy expectations and build something unique with us, reach out!

Its also weird to me that it's phrased "Japanese Media." If you were Japanese, wouldn't it just be "media" to you?

I also found what I believe to be Dima Shen's twitter and instagram where he's writing in Russian, but I have no idea what that means.

I believe that he is living in japan, so when the company says "Headquartered" it could just mean his home and not an actual studio.

And then I found the Rock, Paper, Shotgun article and I think this just sums it up:

The encounter supplied evidence that working at a konbini isn't exactly a dream career within Japan. The store owners found Shen baffling. 'I was this kind of weird gaijin, because I'm here for research and fun rather than working hard,' he says. 'Because usually, they look for immigrants who were really eager for money, and they asked me why I want to work here, and I said 'because I love konbini'. And it was like 'what? Why do you love a low-paid job that's no fun?'

The article also has a quote saying:

Shen seems both thoroughly aware that he is weaving a fairytale and entirely lost in that fairytale. He describes himself and his team as "otakus" - that is, as people who identify as consumers of fantasies. His idealisation of Japan seems to have persisted during his years in Tokyo, shopping at convenience stores more or less every day, and becoming more familiar with the realities of the sector and the lives of its workers.

While the article doesn't mention fetishizing Japan by that terminology, and I'm pretty sure Shen is Asian so I don't know if the term 'orientalism' is applicable, the article does softly imply these topics and I wish they had pushed in further.

There is also a really creepy segment where Shen talks about trying to get a job at a convenient store but then gets kicked out when he claims he was excited to collect references and take pictures of the back of the store.

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