GameSpyStephen Kent, the occasional CNN contributor, and a guy known as "the only reporter in the mainstream media who has any clue about anything related to videogames" was recently in Japan, doing research for a new book about videogames, and wrote a series of articles for GameSpy.
The ones lower down the page are the ones that he's done already.
You may recognize the "Nintendo's New Direction" interview with Iwata, where he revealed the N5's latest name of "GCNext".
His interview with Hideo Kojima is pretty cool. Mostly about MGS3, but covers some other stuff. I liked Kojima's quotes of:
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"What we did to create the experimental environment was that we went to islands like Yakushima, Amami Oshima, and even places in Canada. These are places with a lot of vegetation, like Japanese jungles. Well, obviously not Canada."
and
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"People on my team are masochistic. They enjoy the difficulty of working with PlayStation 2 and we assume that PlayStation 3 will be even more difficult. We know nothing about the system; but it's from Sony, so we assume so."
And I found this line (about the Xbox) in the interview with Famitsu's Editor in Chief interesting:
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"It could have reached 2 million. If it reached that much, publishers like Square-Enix would have taken notice and the situation would have changed … drastically. But Microsoft did not reach the critical 1 million sales.
Dragon Quest was a big title in Japan. Executives at Enix said that if Microsoft sold 3 million Xboxes in Japan, it would release an Xbox version of Dragon Quest."