I’m about over the jet lag. While I had it, I saw some great surises in the Far East. Which is west of California, actually, so it’s confusing.

Our room has a giant air-conditioning unit right outside it. It’s not all blossoms and gardens in Japan.

Machines encrust every visible surface in many parts of town.

The cabbies read sports mags as they wait in traffic. Everyone turns off their engines if there’s a jam.

I had an amazing meal the other day. This was the first course. What are all those little things? Well that’s four soybeans on the right. Some fall leaves. Two dried, flat tropical fish. What a meal. I was still hungry afterwards, but getting full isn’t necessarily what eating’s about, is it?

I went to visit the Large-Scale Computational Science Division at the Cybermedia Center of Osaka University, the other day, invited by Macoto Kikuchi, a physicist and SF-lover who translated a couple of my stories some years back.

[This photo by Japanese SF writer Jyouji Hayashi.]

I gave an Osaka version of the “Psipunk” talk I gave in Amsterdam, although I’m always tweaking it.

A small crowd. When I give my talks to non-English-speakers, nobody laughs, which is disconcerting, as when I perform for native English speakers, I usually have them rolling in the aisles. I think humor is the last aspect of a language that you learn to understand. Video coming soon, maybe.

I liked these young men, a budding SF critic, Hidoshi Yokomichi, and a long-time Rucker fan, Kazuki Ohara.

We walked through some back streets to a restaurant, and I was reminded there’s no place as cyberpunk as Japan. Schoolgirls waiting for a commuter train to pass, a freeway overhead.

We had a great dinner. Amazing sashimi here.

The river through Kyoto comes right out of the mountains and is really healthy. Great Japanese cranes to be seen, I recognize them from ink/scroll paintings.

We went to a big Shinto temple, these guys had really bizarre hats. They were doing a service that we thought was a funeral, with drum and koto flute, drawing stuff out of a an urn that we thought was ashes. But then it turned out they were blessing packages of tea.

The fat carp in the ponds swim the surface and beg for food. This guy looks like a New Yorker, actually.

My ex-pat Scottish-turned-Japanese fan Alex McLaren showed up for my Kyoto talk. He runs a website called www.otaku.com selling Japanese manga, anime, and other otaku must-haves.

There was a good audience for my Kyoto talk, “Life is a Gnarly Comuptation.” I talked about hylozoism and the zen koan about the flapping flag. Video coming soon, maybe.

The “What is Life” conference has an interestingly eclectic mix of people in attendance, thanks to the wide-ranging interests of the organizer, Masatoshi Murase.

Here’s a puzzler picture. One guy was talking about how the brain resolves unfamiliar images. {What are these? Many will know the one on the left, but the one on the right was new to me, and surprisingly hard to get the in-retrospect-obvious aha on. Answers at the end of the post.}

[Photo by Sylvia Rucker]

Today we went to the famous Ryoanji Zen garden with fifteen stones amid raked gravel. We were here about fifteen years ago, and I still think about the place.

It’s not in reality as mellow as the first picture looks, as there are steady streams of school tours coming through, and now and then a loudspeaker kicks into life with an informational speech in Japanese. But still, it was amazing to be there.

If you want to get away from the crowds there are a zillion other temples and shrines, just wander down any street and you’ll end up at one.

I like the UFO look of this one.

They prune their trees with amazing care, so that even a sixty-footer looks like a bonsai.

{A dalmatian dog, Jesus, a cow.}

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