Shigeru Miyamoto (Nintendo) received Japan's prestigious Order of Culture and used the press conference to talk about generative AI, what 'creating' actually means when tools automate execution, and why Kyoto (not Silicon Valley) produced Nintendo's design philosophy. famitsu.com/article/202610/9… The Order of Culture (文化勲章) is one of Japan's highest honors, previously given to film directors like Akira Kurosawa and writers like Yasunari Kawabata. Japan basically put games in the same category as film and literature. He talks about generative AI in a way I have not seen from many working creators. He distinguishes between "creating" and "working." Creation is the hard part: composition, direction, deciding what should exist. Work is execution, and work is satisfying in a way that can fool you into thinking you have created something. He says even before AI, tools have always automated technique, from typewriters to desktop publishing. What gets exposed when that happens is whether you had vision and intent, or whether you were just good at execution. AI is doing the same thing at a larger scale, and he finds this encouraging. "The scary thing is becoming satisfied with the work and mistakenly thinking you created something." People told him for decades that he should go outside of Japan and be in a "global hub". He stayed in Kyoto anyway. His work became more successful overseas than at home. The reason, he says, is that the person on the other side of the screen is human, regardless of geography. Deep local rootedness kept him anchored in concrete experience rather than trend-following.