Iwata shows grace under fire

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A rather curious exchange of words took place at Nintendo's annual shareholders meeting, the last place in the world you'd expect drama to brew up.


At a Nintendo shareholder meeting, one would expect the room to be filled with questions about what the company is planning for the future, how they're trying their best to ensure that the recently-announced Wii U becomes a success, how they plan to attract more 3DS customers, and so on. Again, at a meeting like this, you wouldn't expect drama.


It seems as though one shareholder got a little upset, however, and made some rather unusual comments towards Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata.


With microphone in hand, the unnamed shareholder began with the following:

''I'm concerned about the falling stock price. I own stock, but I don't own a single Nintendo product. I believe games are a waste of time. By the way, the reason I own Nintendo stock is because the name is nice, it's in Kyoto and it was listed in the year of my birth''.


Iwata, despite the unexpected comment, was able to respond with this:

''There are people in this world who don't feel that games are a waste of time, so Nintendo continues to exist. We'd like to eliminate the thinking that playing games by yourself is negative, or when there's a crime you immediately tie it into games. We'd like to raise the social importance of games. We're working to expand the gaming population, yourself included''.


The shareholder then followed up with a question regarding Nintendo's supposed lack of doing anything to help the victims of the recent Japan earthquake and tsunami:

''During the Tohoku earthquake disaster, I believe people in the evacuation centers were lacking in exercise. Why didn't you bring Wii Fit to them? Why didn't you show off to the media that you're doing more for the victims?''


This prompted the CEO to state that Nintendo has in fact provided much needed items to areas affected in the disaster. He also stated that they provided to evacuation shelters, and they simply didn't feel it necessary to get the media involved. In fact, Nintendo had a policy in place specifically aimed at not getting the media involved.

Said policy is so firmly in place that Iwata's response was not to be written. The only reason how we've been able to include his response is because Andriasang was given an inside transcript.