We missed an important birthday

[Maximumbeans]

Well, in the case of shigeru miyamoto, you shoukd say "mr. Shigeru" or "Miyamoto-san" if you want to be polite toward him

It's probably more polite to just let people make an innocuous technical error in their own tributes to him without arguing though, right?

I can see from your later reply that you didn't mean anything malicious.

 

[Minox]

This is not the topic for discussing personal disputes.

As for order of names and politeness "Surname, Given name" or just Mr. Surname/Surname-san will almost always be the more polite way to refer to someone from Japan.

However, the other order is also not a huge issue as most people from Japan are aware that foreigners don't mean anything bad by flipping the order of names.