Borkachev on 12 May 2008
Ha, he's moving from one misunderstanding by setting himself up for another. Watch as people completely take this statement the wrong way:
I am Japanese, so I try to be modest. I'm especially modest person. I dont wish to brag about it to say "I am the amazing Metal Gear guy" or to say "This is the best one", just like how Americans brag stuff like this... That's why i interview in Japanese, and Mr. Sai (translator) translates my side of the inteviews very well in English. Westerners do not have a tradition of modesty. And so, the statements are translated correctly, but the original meaning is totally different.
Just in case, I want to head this one off here. What he's saying isn't that Japanese are modest and Americans are braggarts: he means that Japanese culture expects a much higher level of modesty from its leaders and creators than Western culture. So, when a Japanese person reads the interview in question, they go in with an expectation that Kojima is going to be excessively modest, and frame their reading with that assumption. A westerner, on the other hand, has no such expectation and will read the statement literally. It's really not a "mistranslation," but a cultural misunderstanding.
But frankly, I thought it was pretty clear what he meant and how he meant it in the original interview. He wasn't saying the PS3 was a disappointment, he was saying that the reality of current hardware can never keep up with his ambition. The Edge editor even pointed that out. Any controversy that erupted from this was just the result of fools taking things out of context and willfully misreading them.
