Nintendo shared a video of Splatoon 3 squid kites for New Year’s Eve. It’s a very short clip, which’s only six seconds long. But it shows the tense Octoling and Inkling flapping in the air. It’s not clear if Nintendo plans to sell these Splatoon 3 kits as merchandise. [Thanks, Game Watch!
#1 pic.twitter.com/HMKtWTHcro.
Splatoon (@SplatoonJP) January 6, 2023
The squid kites call it the New Year’s custom in Japan. From the time of Edo, you can fly kites in Japan without having to wait for the new year. This word is pronounced in Japanese as tako. However, Nintendo’s flying squid kites is really a reference to Japanese kite history. In the past the word for squid is in fact ika-nobori, meaning that ika is an official source of information.
A part of the reason why you couldn’t fly a kite back in the day was because large kites would fall and cause damage to fields or buildings. Not only that, but some people who play with kites can get involved in fights. In this fight, each fight killed itself by injuries. The government banned kites a day. The population turned around that by pretending that they were not ika-nobori and flying tako-age, and hence the Kanto region started to call kites tako.
In addition to a bit of history lessons, the Nintendos Splatoon 3 squid kites is the annual celebration of the New Year. Splatoon is available on the Nintendo Switch.