Interview: Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft - Part 1

It’s late September, which means that the Tokyo Game Show is upon us! As gaming journalists from around the world converge in Tokyo, I warmed up for Thursday by meeting up with Brian Ashcraft of the Gawker-owned gaming blog Kotaku.

Dan Orlowitz: For the two of our readers who haven’t heard of Kotaku, could you introduce yourself?

Brian Ashcraft: My name is Brian Ashcraft, and I’m the night editor at kotaku.com

DO: Well, the Japan editor, right?

BA: Yeah… but it’s become my official title. It actually says ‘night editor’ on my business cards. We’re posting 24 hours a day now, so what would be the day for us is the night for the States, and that’s what I’m in “charge” of.

DO: Let’s start with what brought you to Japan in the first place.

BA: So when I was in college, I was working for a movie distribution company, and I met a lot of famous Japanese directors like Kinji Fukasaku, Beat Takeshi. So, around that time I became really interested in Japanese popular culture like videogames.

DO: But you were a gamer before that.

BA: Yeah, of course. So I came out after college to Tokyo, and I was here for a little bit, and it was okay… I mean, it’s not bad. And then I went to Osaka after that, and I thought “this is a great town”, so I stayed around.

DO: So how did you pick up the language, were you self-taught?

BA: In college I studied French, which was very helpful. I didn’t study the language before coming here. As you probably know, you can live here and never pick up the language.

DO: But you can’t do as much.

BA: Exactly, and that was the first year of my life here.

DO: What year was that?

BA: 1996? when was that… I forget, it was a while back. And then at that time I met my wife, and she did not want to learn English, or was not interested at all in learning the English language at all.

DO: Which forced you…

BA: To learn it, so we would go to restaurants and she would be like, “Okay, order,” and it’s like “well, I can’t really read it.” So she’d say, “Well, you need to learn how to read it, because usually when people go out to dinner, the guy orders for the girl.” You know what I mean? And so after that it just increased exponentially because I was in a spot where you have to learn it not just to communicate with another person, but to live your daily life and get your point across.

DO: What did you use to study?

BA: I dunno, maybe you felt this way. You start small, like basic needs. It seems like you’re studying for these little tasks.

DO: Like how textbooks do it; they teach you to go to the supermarket, then the hospital…

BA: Exactly.

DO: What about manga, music, and games?

BA: Of course games are a great way to pick up stuff; music is fantastic.

DO: What games did you play?

BA: Of course RPGs, anything that’s kind of text-heavy is good, but I think the thing that really helped was music, because I think that when you first start learning, trying to learn through games can actually get frustrating.

DO: Because of all the kanji.

BA: Yes, but not only that, but it’ll take you much longer to get through the game.

DO: For example the new Zelda DS game has furigana. It’s pretty rare.

BA: Yeah, it’s great. We asked Miyamoto about that and he was like, “Yeah, that’s obvious. It’s an easy feature to put in, so why not do it?”

DO: How do you feel about the fact that there are so many DS trainers for various languages, but there aren’t any Japanese trainers meant for the foreign market?

BA: I’d think there would be a huge demand for it. It seems like a no-brainer, if they did a basic, for example, ‘how to go to that ramen restaurant and order a bowl of soup’, or ‘how to go to that hat store and try out a hat’. Those very basic skills; it’d be a huge hit.

DO: So you moved to Osaka, learned Japanese, how did you get involved in game journalism?

BA: Shortly after I came to Osaka I started writing. A friend of mine from high school, his roommate was an associate editor at Wired Magazine. So, basically, they were like “hey, do you want to write for us?” I was like “Well, I’ve really never written for a magazine before,” and they were like “Okay.” It was a really good time for magazines… I didn’t know what the fuck what a blog was, nobody knew, so magazines were at their peak. So they were like “Yeah, well, just write for us.” It was basically just finding interesting things in Japan and just sending it off.

DO: Like Japanese Schoolgirl Watch.

BA: Yeah, like that. That’s part of what they wanted me to do. It was a good time to get in, and I’d send something off, and get back the edited copy and be like “wow, that’s really different from what I wrote.” And basically learn how to construct an article, a 250-word thing, make it punchy…

DO: How to stick to the word limits.

BA: Yeah, and basically how to write. And I was getting paid to do that, which is kind of funny, you know what I mean? They took some big risks on me… “You can do a 2000-word feature on Sin City,” “we’ll fly you to New Orleans to do a piece on absinthe.” And then another writer at Wired introduced me to Gawker, the company that owns Kotaku, and they were looking to expand Kotaku. At the time it was only Brian Crescente doing 12 posts a day, and probably talking to himself.

DO: And now it’s about 100 posts a day.

BA: It’s a lot of content, and that was always the goal, they wanted to amp up the content.

DO: What are the challenges of reporting on Japanese culture as opposed to reporting Western content?

BA: Well, you know this, living here changes you.

DO: Yeah.

BA: It becomes normal. Even now, people are like “Wow, this is so interesting,” and you’re like, “No, that’s normal.”

DO: You posted the very explicit FPS footage, and I’m just looking at that and thinking “Wait, did I play that at Comiket?” The two of us think it’s normal, but everyone else… So obviously you have a cultural bias, how does that reflect in your reporting?

BA: The problem becomes often that if you live here and if you understand the language, you kind of have a shorthand that 98% of the readers don’t have. People who live in Japan kind of know what’s going on, but the other readers don’t, so the challenge is to present it in a way that shows the context, but doesn’t play to some fantasy or stereotype like ‘Japan is only robots, or Blade Runner.’

DO: On the flip side, do you react differently to news from the US?

BA: It’s weird, I don’t know what’s happening in America anymore. I can look on the internet, but at night when I watch the evening news, Fuji TV or whatever, it’s what’s happening in Japan. Some woman murdered her child, and there’s an earthquake, and that’s what people are concerned about.

DO: It’s a question of how much to stay connected, though, because the more I expose myself to Western media, the less exposure you have to Japanese.

BA: It’s a hard balance.

DO: I figure watching American TV keeps me sane. Anime, J-dramas… then some Prison Break.

BA: It’s funny, living in Japan has made me… living outside your own country makes you learn about your own country. Living in Japan, you learn about America… like, really American things I love. I’m from Texas and I hated country music growing up, because I thought it was this stupid Texas thing, then I moved here and it’s like, “Wow, Hank Williams? Johnny Cash? Not bad.”

DO: I prefer Japanese music, but that’s because American music just seems so… bad.

BA: Well, that’s true too.

DO: It’s funny because lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Japanese music that I’ve been listening to since I first started getting into Japanese culture, 4-5 years ago, and it’s frightening because I can understand it now.

BA: Yeah, I remember when I was watching Battle Royale. I was living in this tiny one-room apartment over a Chinese restaurant, and I was watching on this really small 13″ TV and I’m like, “Wow, the words that they’re saying… I don’t understand all of it, but I understand the meaning now,” and I called a friend of mine, and I was like, “Do you know what I mean?” and he was like “No.” It’s that feeling, that, “This means this and it has a punch to it.”

Check out part two of this exciting interview!