This week's Famitsu has an interview with Hideo Kojima and Metal Gear Solid Touch producer Yasuyo Watanabe. The headline for the story is very careful to accentuate that Watanabe is female. How careful, you ask?
So careful that, literally, the headline reads: "Interview with Metal Gear Solid Touch creators Hideo Kojima and its first-timer FEMALE producer".
The red font is not just our emphasis. Look at that photo. Those two kanji, in red, are "josei", meaning "female".
Let's back up and go over this again: the Cliff's Notes version of the title of the article is basically "New Game Made by a Man Named Hideo Kojima and a Woman Whose Name We Will Mention in the Story Itself, Though Not in this Title".
Is this the, uhh, nicest way to report this? Probably not. Maybe they could approach it a bit differently, say "Interview with Hideo Kojima and Some n00b Producer", and then in the article, it could just come out naturally that she's a woman. I mean, there's a photo of her in there, and everything.
Famitsu is typically read by schoolboys in convenient stores before school on Friday. Is this kind of nigh-subliminal sexism really the kind of thing we should be exposing them to? And thus open a thousand avenues to discussion of Japanese society.
[via Famitsu]