Nintendo shared a video about Splatoon 3 ink kite for the new year. It’s a short clip that’s only six seconds long, but it shows Inkling and Octoling flapping their wings in the air. No news on whether Nintendo plans to sell these or not Splatoon 3 kite as cargo. [Thanks, Game Watch!]
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凧揚げはその昔、「イカ揚げ」「イカノボリ」と呼ばれ、今もその文化が残る場所があるうぁ
s#スプラトゥーン3 pic.twitter.com/HMKtWTHcro— Splatoon（スプラトゥーン） (@SplatoonJP) January 6, 2023
The squid kites are an allusion to a New Year custom in Japan. Back in the Edo period, you couldn’t fly a kite in Japan except for the New Year. In Japanese, the word “tako” is homophone for both “kite” and “octopus”. However, Nintendo’s “squid kite” is actually a reference to Japan’s history of kite flying. In the past, the word kite was actually “ika-nobori”, with “ika” being the homonym for “kite” and “squid”.
Part of the reason why you couldn’t fly a kite in the old days was because the big kites would fall and cause damage to fields or buildings. Not only that, kite players can fight each other. These fights sometimes lead to injury or even death. As a result, the government banned kite flying. People solved that problem by pretending that they were flying tako-age and not ika-nobori, and thus the Kanto region began to call kites “tako”.
In addition to a little history lesson, Nintendo Splatoon 3 squid kite is its happy new year message. Splatoon 3 available on Nintendo Switch.
