After 34 years in games, Persona director Katsura Hashino just got a ‘Newcomer Award’ and $5,000 from the Japanese government

Katsura Hashino has been doing this a while. The designer, most famous for his work as director on Persona 3, 4, and 5 as well as, most recently, Metaphor: ReFantazio, has been working at Atlus since I was literally one year old, all the way back in 1994.

So it’s with amused bafflement that I bring you the news that Hashino has just been awarded Japan’s (pace yourself) “Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s New Face Award in the Media Arts Division of the Arts Encouragement Prize” (via Automaton). Atlus tweeted that he had received the prize on Monday.

That is to say he’s the recipient of a prize that the Japanese government specifically gives out to, um, new faces. Newcomers, you know. On the award’s official website (machine translated), the body responsible for the prize refers to it as a “Newcomer Award” and notes that it comes with an 800,000 yen (about $5,000) prize.

Hashino richly deserves an award, of course. The mark the Persona series has made under his stewardship is enormous, and Metaphor: ReFantazio is a damn good time too. I just find it funny he got one of the two “new face” awards instead of the other two prizes, the less specific “Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award” which, incidentally, comes with a bigger 1.2 million yen ($8,000) prize.

After all, none other than Hideo Kojima got the latter prize back in 2022, although by that point Kojima had been working on games for 36 years. Maybe 35 years is the cut-off, the point at which you’re no longer a newcomer? Maybe Japan’s government is staffed by Asari-like politicians who all live to be 1,000 years old.

Anyway, neither Hashino or Atlus seemed particularly put out by the new face award, so maybe I’m the one taking crazy pills here. Stay tuned for the Japanese government’s upcoming 30-under-30 awards; I hear top prize is tipped to go to Beat Takeshi.