Aoyama Gosho Special Interview Part 1 (The Crimson Love Letter)

This is an interview with Gosho Aoyama about the new movie "The Crimson Love Letter," from the special illustration book "Hattori Heiji & Toyama Kazuha: Secret Archives." published May 13, 2017 by the Shogakukan. Part 2, and interviews with other cast member to come in the future.
**footnotes regarding the translation are added in text after the images at the bottom of this post. **

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*1:  Competitive Karuta, is a Japanese card game. "Karuta" is a Japanization of the Portuguese word "carta" which means "card". The Portuguese introduced playing cards to Japan in the 1500's. Competitive Karuta is called "Kyougi Karuta" in Japanese and is played with cards called "uta-garuta" ("uta" meaning "song" and "garuta" coming from "karuta"). The "uta-garuta" have poems written on them. So they are cards with "lyrical" poems written on them. There are 100 poems in total and they are known as "hyakunin isshu". They are waka poems by 100 different poets. The basic rules are that someone reads one of the poems and the two competing players try to be the first one to find the card with that poem written on it from the cards layed out in front of them. There are many videos on YouTube you can watch to see the game being played. Here is an example.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhLb7AklHWQ

 **Kinshiro Toyama was the alias of Toyama Kagemoto, a government official in the Edo period. Kinshiro Toyama ended up taking a position that used to belong to Ooka Tadasuke, who, because he was the governor of Echizen, was known as Ooka Echizen. These two characters, especially Toyama, have made many appearances in popular culture, and also famously in Kabuki Theater.

***The namesake of Ooka Momiji is actually from a drama called "Ooka Echizen". The characters in that drama are based on the real historical figures. In that drama there is also a character called Iori Sakakibara played by actor Muga Takewaki, hence the butler's name Muga Iori.