Last year, Hobonichi published a book about Satoru Iwata simply called Iwata-San. Today, VIZ Media has announced they will be publishing the book for a release outside of Japan as Ask Iwata.

This book marks the first release of a book from Hobonichi outside of Japan. What could this mean in regards to more Hobonichi books being translated, though? Well, there’s a difference here in that this book was already intended to be translated. With this book, the translation rights were sold through a third party company to any interested publishers, and it seems VIZ won the auction for these rights. I know all this from actually reaching out and almost entering the rights auction myself. All the details to reach out to this third party company were on the Iwata-San website, and, when Iwata-San was announced, Hobonichi said right away they wanted it to be translated and sold overseas. Although Hobonichi hasn’t stated whether other books may be translated like they did with Ask Iwata, it’s possible that if this book is successful, they might consider it.

If you’d like to learn more about the making of Ask Iwata from the book’s editor, the creator of Hobonichi’s MOTHER merchandise and Shigesato Itoi’s second-in-command at Hobonichi, Yasuhiro Nagata, you might be interested in one of my translations published on Source Gaming.