My aim is to create different concepts from other artists.
For example, when I am asked to work on a game-related project,
I try to look at things unrelated to the game genre.
For example, I would look at fashion magazines, or go to art exhibitions,
I would also try to watch lesser-known films.
I take my inspiration from there,
however if I get inspired from one thing then develop it, it would tend to look like the original.
I try to inspire myself from two to three sources, merge them and go from there.
I joined the Silent Hill team right after entering Konami.
It wasn't named like this at the time.
We were aiming at making a game version of Stephen King's "The Mist".
I was assigned to that team.
At first, I was a new grad so I would work on a lot of tasks.
At some point, I was told that I was making interesting creature drawings,
Mr. Toyama, the director, then assigned me to design creatures.
Before I joined Konami, when I was a student before university,
there was this film named "Jacob's Ladder", made by the famous British director Adrian Lyne.
It was closer to the suspense genre.
I had the chance to see it in the theater, it left a great impression on me.
That was the main base of my inspiration, to which I added ideas on top.
The result was the elementary school's Otherworld version in the first Silent Hill.
Robot anime were trending when I was a child.
Parents would buy robot toys for their children.
The environment I grew up in was a modest home,
robot toys were something expensive that we couldn't afford.
Instead, my parents would buy me plastic models of sports cars or tanks.
At first, I wasn't familiar with tanks in general.
As a child, I would look at the tanks with symbolic tank guns,
powerful designs that are easy to understand for a child.
From there, I was more and more attracted and interested by German and Russian tanks.
What led me to speak to Wargaming,
first there was the fact that I liked German and Russian tanks from World War II,
I was hoping someday to do a project related to those.
As I posted a tweet about this, one of my followers stumbled upon it.
That person was apparently linked to people from Wargaming.
He connected me to them,
then I was told there was an event where they offered me to create an original tank concept.
One part of the project was my background working on Silent Hill.
I looked at how I could add in elements from Pyramid Head or the Otherworld to the tank.
I then used barbed wire, symbolic of Silent Hill's Otherworld,
which I combined with the geometric form of the Pyramid Head's helmet to make a Panther.
I looked at a design that was plausible for the German army to make in 1945.
I happened to own a lot of documentation about German tanks from that time,
I would look at the essence of the period,
or what was the level of Germany's heavy industry at the time,
I didn't want to make a tank that could not be made back then,
but instead something with a "What if?" nuance that was hypothetically possible.
Personally, I am a bit off the wall, it's a bit hard to explain.
I don't like making things that are unbelievable for the time.
If I weren't interested in tanks, I probably wouldn't have taken that approach.
But as I like German tank designs, I insisted on not breaking that reality aspect.
I tend not to follow trends.
I want to make designs for people who appreciate my work years later,
so they can keep enjoying them for the years to come.