Back in May this year, Hideo Kojima surprised fans in Japan with a well-known but somewhat old-school marketing campaign. He and his team at Kojima Productions handed out free pocket tissue packets on the streets of Tokyo to promote Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. On the packaging was a QR code that led to a cryptic, unlisted YouTube teaser showcasing the game’s environment, and later, the collaboration with VTuber Usada Pekora. With both the tissue campaign and the title’s release behind him now, Kojima recently shed some light on why he went for this tactic and how it worked out for him in an essay for An-An magazine. It turns out, even Hideo Kojima experienced being avoided like a suspicious stranger by unassuming passersby in Japan.
Ever since the COVID pandemic, he explains, Japan’s tradition of pocket tissue advertising has been fading away. It doesn’t help that the method is costlier, less efficient, and harder to collect data from than digital advertising. But despite the disadvantages, Kojima was set on distributing tissues to promote Death Stranding because of the thematic link he felt with the practice. “Death Stranding is a game about connections. That’s why, although outdated, I wanted to try out this gesture of physically handing something to someone. The act of receiving an item directly from a stranger is very close to the kind of connection explored in Death Stranding.”
Kojima and his team took to three major spots in Tokyo (Ikebukuro, Akihabara and Shinagawa) to hand out the tissues, during the busiest hours of the day (he originally wanted to pull the stunt at the famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing, but this is apparently not allowed). Although they wore robes branded with the Death Stranding 2 logo, people passing by them were not keen on receiving the complimentary pocket tissues.
“About half an hour had passed since we started handing them out. Hardly anyone was willing to take one. Even when I reached out, they wouldn’t take it. They’d walk away without even making eye contact. Some even went out of their way to avoid us, as if they were walking around something dangerous.” Left with no other choice, Kojima decided to post about was his team was doing on X, which led to the pocket tissues disappearing in the blink of an eye across all three locations. “It was an analog stunt going against the tide of the times, but by fusing it with digital power, we created an even stronger connection,” Kojima comments.
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