“The green digital rain code effect in the 1999 film The Matrix was composed entirely of Japanese sushi recipes.”

The green, falling digital code depicted as rain in the film "The Matrix" consisted of Japanese sushi recipes. Rating: Mixture. While Simon Whiteley, the production designer behind the code, claims to have used his wife's Japanese cookbooks to help create the design, the Japanese characters were mixed with other symbols and heavily stylized for artistic effect.

The green matrix code is essentially the visual representation of the simulated world within The Matrix. Interestingly, the symbols used in the code were inspired by Japanese katakana characters, mirrored and arranged into cryptic sequences. This subtle design choice adds to the cyberpunk aesthetic of the film, reinforcing its futuristic and digital themes.

Speaking with CNET in 2017, the code's designer, Simon Whiteley, revealed that the now-famous green code (also known as 'digital rain' among fans) was inspired by one of his Japanese wife's cookbooks. 'I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes,' he admitted. 'Without that code, there is no Matrix.' He elaborated that he also relied on Japanese alphabet books used by his children at school and hand-drew all the symbols himself.

My wife is an amazing cook and we've just got tonnes of cookbooks and cooking magazines at home. So I started looking through the cookbooks, and also these alphabet books my kids had from Japanese school, and I ended up hand-drawing all of the graphics using the alphabet sheets and the cookbooks. The green hue was incorporated in order to match the look of text on an old IBM CRT monitor.

Being married to a Japanese wife, Whiteley was familiar with Japanese typography, and he used the knowledge to crack the code. All three Japanese alphabets were studied as per their visual complexity, and finally, Katakana was chosen for the code. Later, some Arabic numerals were also added to the code. Whitely's primary design reference for the code was his wife's Japanese cookbooks and magazines, followed by his kids' Japanese alphabet books.

This effect was created by designer Simon Whiteley, who used reversed Japanese katakana characters mixed with Latin letters and numbers. The green color was chosen to evoke early computer terminals and create a sense of digital mystique and power.

The man behind the code is Simon Whiteley, who worked as a production designer on the film. In an interview with CNet last Thursday, Whiteley revealed that the source of that mystifying code was none other than a batch of his Japanese wife's cookbooks—and the sushi recipes he found within them. 'I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes,' Whiteley told the publication.

"I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes," Whiteley reveals. But, just like all The Matrix's optical and narrative puzzle boxes, there's an answer behind the mystery. To heighten the sense that something was perplexing, even wrong, they added Arabic numerals to the existing characters (aka the existing sushi recipes) and repeated certain characters.

Whiteley Was Inspired By Katakana Typography. The green hue of the letters was made to match the text of old IBM CRT monitors. Whitely also combined the Japanese letters with Arabic numerals to create a collage of fonts. This, combined with added marks like lines and dots, means that the code does not look clean, and isn't easily translatable, even to Japanese speakers.

Multiple interviews with Simon Whiteley confirm the green code was inspired by and partially composed from scanned Japanese sushi recipes from his wife's cookbooks, mixed with katakana from schoolbooks. However, claims of it being 'entirely' recipes are hyperbolic; frame-by-frame analysis shows a mix of characters without full coherent recipes.

The glyphs used include Kangxi radicals (Han characters), numerals (0-9), English alphabet letters (such as Z), and other symbols including asterisk, plus, colon, equals, period, less-than, greater-than, double quotation, vertical bar, broken bar, and underscore.

His wife is Japanese, so he decided to go through her cookbooks for inspiration. That's when he came up with the idea to model the code based on the Japanese typography used in those cookbooks. So he actually copied sushi recipes by hand, the letters were scanned and digitized, and they run vertically to give that rain effect.

Whitley humorously noted that every time people compliment the iconic code they are unknowingly praising a cookbook. His wife's influence in the cultural elements of sushi recipes became an integral part of the film's identity. And finally to all of those who say that the Matrix Code did not come from sushi recipes, Whitley, the guy that created the code, says Japanese speakers won't be able to lift the recipe straight from the movie because the digital rain is written in code. Moreover, he says sushi recipes are usually written in hiragana or kanji, which are syllabic and logographic characters respectively. The Matrix code, on the other hand, is stylized as katakana, which are syllabic characters used for spelling foreign words.