There is an old man NPC in Spagonia called Gigi, which is both an Italian name for males and a Japanese word (jiji) that means old man

>>534999572
He did a good job.

I could see it happen easily actually. Yoshimura is an anime writer and she joined Sonic Team as a writer. And they did the same with Ian, although he is only a script writer, probably because it's harder to communicate with foreigners, or maybe they didn't trust him as much