Shigesato Itoi (糸井重里) is the founder of Hobonichi Co., Ltd, and creator of the MOTHER and Itoi’s No. 1 Bass Fishing series. Overseas in the West, he’s mostly known for his work surrounding MOTHER, but truth to be told his monumental career spans far beyond just video-games!

Itoi was born in Maebashi City, Gunma on November 10th, 1948, with his parents divorcing soon after his birth. Custody over Itoi was given to his father, who was a legal agent. However, since his father was a busy man (and rather distant), Itoi was mostly brought up by his grandmother – he would not reunite with his mother until 1981.

Itoi has mentioned the following about his childhood in a biography published by Hobonichi called Koga Fumitake ga Matometa Itoi Shigesato no Koto or Shigesato Itoi Stuff Collected by Fumitake Koga.

• Itoi’s dad was a part of WWII and had Itoi in 1948 after returning from the war.
• Itoi’s name was based off of the Japanese pronunciation of the name Julien, specifically Julien Sorel, who is the protagonist in the book The Red and the Black.
• In school, on Mother’s Day, kids would give red carnations to their moms, but for kids without moms, they’d be given white carnations. Itoi felt singled out and embarrassed by it as a kid. He tried his best not to cry about it.
• His father remarried around 2nd or 3rd grade, but it was hard for Itoi to call her mom.
• People treated him with a lot of pity when he was a kid because he didn’t have a mom.
• He has no memory of ever being hugged, “after all, I couldn’t hug myself.”
• Later on, in the 1980s, he saw John Lennon hugging Yoko Ono on the cover of a Rolling Stones book and he really understood that feeling after going through all he had and remembering Lennon’s song, saying, “It’s MOTHER!”

As a child, Itoi was obsessed with tofu and comic-books (both of which can be later seen as influential icons in the MOTHER series.) For most of his childhood, he wanted to become a cartoonist, and through that became very interested in literature as a whole.

During university, Itoi developed somewhat of a rebellious personality, and headed the activist movement against Hosei University, where he attended at the time. After being arrested five times during this protest, he decided to drop out of school and pursue other ventures.

Under recommendations from a friend, he enrolled in a copywriting course at Sendenkaigi in 1968. From then on, he started developing TV commercials for a company called “Something” which went bankrupt in 1973. After his tenure there, Itoi decided to work as a freelancer, and over the rest of the decade worked with many different parties – this included commercials for designer jeans, and even writing his own manga series called “Penguin Gohan” with artist Teruhiko Yumura!

It was in 1979 that he first formed his own company called “Tokyo Shigesato Itoi Office” (renamed Hobonichi on June 6th, 1998), publishing his first independent work called “The Complete Collection of Snack Arts”, a comedic collection of parlour tricks you can perform at bars using things like matches and origami!

In 1982, Itoi married one of his personal friends, an unnamed civilian woman. However, soon after the birth of his daughter, it was found he had been cheating on his wife with actress Kanako Higuchi. Itoi and his wife then got divorced, and he moved in with Higuchi, where he began to get more involved in on-screen appearances. The two then married in 1993, as Itoi began seeing his daughter less and less. 

After decades of creating and appearing in commercials, publishing written work and so forth, Itoi began developing an interest in video-games. Often during trips to the grocery store, he’d find himself picking up a new Famicom game on the way out. Interested to learn more about the up-and-coming game industry, Itoi hosted a special called “Shigesato Itoi’s TV GAME MUSEUM” on November 6th, 1987.

It was also during this time in 1987 that he first visited Nintendo of Japan’s offices to pitch his idea for a video-game project, inspired by the Dragon Quest series! After a brutal rejection from renowned video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, Itoi went back to the drawing board and came back with the idea for MOTHER. Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi was impressed, and suggested Itoi form his own company to help develop the game and nurture talents from younger aspiring game designers – thus, APE Inc. (reformed as Creatures Inc. in 1995 by Tsunekazu Ishihara and Benimaru Itoh) was born. 

One of the major influences in creating MOTHER was to make something that he could connect to his young daughter with, even from a distance. However, according to Itoi in 2011, she never played through the game all the way to the end. 

Among Itoi’s most famous projects alongside MOTHER would be his gold digging excavations. Many of these were publicly televised (such as the Tokugawa Reserves in 1991, during the development of MOTHER 2) and were usually unsuccessful in the end. The most recent special, focused on Mt. Akagi aired in 2017. Itoi would continue to appear in these specials (and others focused on bass fishing) while working on the MOTHER games. Naturally, many fans became concerned that these were the cause of the delays for MOTHER 2 and 3. 

His involvement in video-game development would last well into the mid 2000’s when MOTHER 3 finally released on the Game Boy Advance. From June 1991 to 2001, Itoi served as director of HAL Research Institute, where he created the logo for HAL Laboratory, and their mascot Inu Tamago!

There are many things that have inspired his career over the years – the most prominent being American films and foreign novellas. He cited 2001: A Space Odyssey as both the major influence for MOTHER and his love for monkeys (with the Hobonichi’s mascot being a monkey designed by Gugi Akiyama) The most influential people in his life according to Itoi are: Motoshi Fujita, Makoto Wada, Koichi Tsuchiya, and Tadanori Yokoo. 

Nowadays, Itoi can mostly be found on his website, the Almost Daily Itoi News (Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun) which launched in 1998 after purchasing his first computer, a Macintosh. His goal with the website is to inspire positivity in little ways, which can be seen with their humble merchandising through planners and other daily necessities! 

After all, through all of his work – whether it be a small commercial, or grandiose video-game, Shigesato Itoi’s hopes have been to inspire and uplift others. Something he hopes to continue doing through the work he’s left behind, even after he’s gone. 

Below is a list of his accomplishments and finished works: