The Japanese machine arcades are loaded with awesome graphics. I’ve played a little pachinko, but it’s not as much fun as it was ten years ago, the games are less like pinball and more like slot machines now. Great walls of noise in the pachinko parlors. Wikipedia says a lot of them are owned by sinister North Koreans and yakuza.

We saw a famous sight called the Golden Temple, but this golden skyscraper in a mirrorwall is more photogenic. Like, so what if something’s gold? Hushed awe before rare minerals.

No need to go to the crowded temples and shrines, I’m finding, as there’s one every few blocks anyway. I like the giant lantern in this one. Spent a peaceful half hour there this morning before the strenuous business of attending lectures and seeing “real” sights.

An old guy was sweeping out the temple grounds with a twig broom. People wandering by, throwing a coin in the big grate, clapping their hands to pray, pulling on a fat rope to ring a gong so the gods hear. That statue of the god is covered with squares of gold paper that people have stuck onto it, so the face, in particular, is swathed.

Even the little figures in the Walk/Don’t Walk signs look Japanese, I noticed today. They’re wearing hats.

We bought tickets to the Noh theater this afternoon. It was three short plays. Well, not really plays in the Western sense. Noh is more about getting some feeling going and milking that. The second one was about a mother looking for her lost child. The mother was played by a stout man wearing a “mother” Noh mask. I’d seen Noh masks before and had remarked upon how small they are; I’d thought maybe the ones I’d seen were just models. But they really do wear a tiny mask like that on the stage. It barely covers the actor’s forehead and mouth. The mask was carved in an interesting way, so that, depending on the tone of the performer’s voice, the mask looked either happy or sad, even though really it’s immobile wood. They had three musicians onstage as well, two drummers and a guy with a flute, and a chorus of men. The flutist went only for gnarly sounds, blowing the flute so hard that the notes split, fuzzed and cracked. The drummers kind of yodeled.

The first of the three Noh plays was pretty dull. It was seven guys dressed in gray and black, kneeling on the stage, intoning in mournful tones a poem about a dead warrior’s ghost in Japanese for 45 minutes with no music. Most of the people in the audience were digging it, though. They were following along in books. Almost all of them were older than us.

Back outside it was a sunny October day. This enormous orange arch is outside the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art, we peeked in there. I kind of like the way the Japanese were painting in the 1930s, it’s still the old themes, but with more color.

It was Saturday and the buses were jammed. On the ride home I was squeezed in with a gaggle of cute school girls; they loved it when I took this picture. They took pictures of me back, and practiced their English on me. They were in Kyoto on a class trip from Hokkaido, the somewhat rural northern island of Japan. Just about every single time a school girl poses for a photo here, she flashes the old “peace” sign. Incredible that’s still in fashion after, what, forty years. I wonder if it, like, went out and then came back in? Or if it’s just a permanent thing now. I made sure to flash the V myself when it was my turn to pose.

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.}

We wandered around Tokyo yesterday. This little creature is an ad for a store called something like hysteric.

Stopped in at some tea shops; the deal is you get powdered green tea whisked to a foam in hot water, just a few ounces, kind of a super version of tea, you get a good heavy hit. With it I got a sweet bean cake, they came in different colors, I went for green and purple

Always admiring the octopi in the market. Tentacle frenzy.

They make all these long vegetables like cukes, eggplants and daikon radishes into pickles by setting them in this salty muddy bean paste and massaging them all day long.

This was in the garden of Kawai Kanjiro. The zen thing. That rock no means there by accident. Harmony. I once heard a good way to start learning sculpture is to try to make a sphere.

Two guys were playing music for a radio station on a side street, a guitar and a conga drum. The streets were mad crowded with shoppers Sunday afternoon. Nice to sit on the curb watching the guitarist.

Everyone layering onto each other, a human collage.

We saw a weak museum show in Gion, the best thing was a maple growing up to an elliptical hole. Kind of a saucerian effect here. The maples haven’t turned red yet, which will be a big deal.

I saw a Shinto shrine with a robot inside a glass case. A regular Unimation arm robot like you see on a factory assembly line. But they’d dressed it up like a Shinto priest or demon, with a robe and a face. This combo seems quite Japanese.

The robot was moving all the time, turning his head, like the puppets in “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie,” nosing at a toy mouse that he had. And if you put in 200 yen, the robot fetches a paper fortune and drops it in a chute to slide out to your hand (you can always buy fortuens at temples.)

The utility poles are really overloaded with wires here. I think in the U.S. we put most of them underground.

Great patterns of the wires against the sky, dig that helix.

Nice walking around with a camera when the right shot jumps out.

A store looking like a face…

Another idol in the form of a rock with an apron! And a face drawn on with magic marker. Littler offerings of food in the bowls. The crow is the priest here, or the verger, inky, mangy, ideogrammatic. How would he get along with one of Bruegel’s crows? Peck!

I was in Japan a couple of times in the 1990s, first for a Mondo 2000 related conference, and then for a speaking tour arranged by Mr. Ohmori of Humanmedia. Those times I had “handlers” the whole time, and this time we’re a bit more on our own.

Doing anything in Japan is about twice as hard as you’d expect. In European countries, (a) lots of people know English, and (b) you can figure out what signs say. In Japan, (a) hardly anyone seems to speak English, not even people like hotel clerks or tourist office people, and when they do, they tend to just say “Yes,” to anything, to be agreeable, (b) you can’t figure out any signs, they’re squiggles instead of letters, and when there is a Roman alphabet transcriptions, the place names are random strings of syllables, always the same few interchangeable syllables. My wife says it’s like we’re illiterate deaf-mutes.

There aren’t many other Westerners here, we exchange haunted, hang-dog looks when our paths cross, untouchable pariahs that we are. It would take years for me to have the faintest notion of what’s going on here, it’s totally like being on an alien world. But not that alien, after all: people are still eating and buying things and pairing up.

The Japanese are very diverse in their facial appearances and clothing; it’s entertaining to sit somewhere and watch the river of humanity stream by.

Many of them are extremely beautiful, both women and men—with faces symmetrized around refreshingly unusual norms. Full lips abound. You still see some women in kimonos. Lots of the men are in black suits, as usual, but some younger guys wear rattier hipster garb.

A lot of teenage and twenty-year old girls are into this eye-catching hooker look: high-heeled shoes or boots with black socks running up to the knees, worn with a microskirt or with hotpants. Many have bleached their hair to shades of orange.

Many Japanese women use a traditional walking gait in which the hips don’t move, it’s sort of the opposite of a model’s runway wriggle. Instead they hold the hips rigid and crouch a little, moving with bent knees. When you cross this walk with high-heel hooker boots, you get a really strange effect, it’s like seeing a predatory alien on the prowl.

We visited the Nijo castle where the local warlord lived, the Shogun. I think of a castle or a cathedral as stone, but here the “castles” and temples are wood and paper. To be safe in his Nijo castle, the Shogun had all the floors rigged to squeak when you walk on them: “nightingale floors.”

You’re always having to take off your shoes to go in places.

Also, he did have stone outer walls around the castle grounds, and a moat. Maybe I’ll make the castle atop the beanstalk in Hylozoic be like a Japanese castle.

We walked around the old geisha neighborhood Gion, tiny wood houses. A few kimonos. This picture is of a non-wood house in a different neighborhood, a house like upended shipping container, a bar, actually, with guys drinking inside.

Saw a cultural variety show of Japanese entertainment, including bunraku, where puppeteers in black hoods are up on the stage with a lifesize puppet. Seems like a symbol of something. Also it seemed like featherbedding, in the sense of hiring extra workers: three people were working this one lady puppet (the third is hidden behind it.)

We hit a big temple atop a hill. I can’t remember the name: some random string of syllables.

We get lost every time we take the bus, always getting off at the incorrect squiggle or R.S.O.S.

It was nice at the temple, with a pot of incense people fanned into their hair, special water to drink, dipping it from a waterfall with cups on long sticks.

A big gong I got to hit, sending up a prayer for my new grandson, Desmond, and for peace, love and understanding on this journey to Japan.

Ate some udon. Saw some worn rocks wearing aprons. Why? I’ll never know. Good to see trees. They love gnarly trees here, in the parks, you’ll see the groundskeepers studying each tree, discussing where to lop off a twig to make the tree gnarlier.

On the way back down hill we walked through a graveyard, like a little city of its own, an identical spire atop each little cache for ashes.

A sign for a monument-maintenance service showed sad-face and happy-face gravestones.

Usually when I travel it’s pretty easy to get money from cash machines with my ATM card. Hard to find an ATM here, and a lot of them don’t have English on the buttons, it’s hard to figure which of the four possible card orientations to use (they vary randomly from machine to machine) and even then a lot of machines won’t honor my bank. We ended up on the roof of a department store looking for ATM machines. They had a room of giant kiddie toy machines. And a jungle of ventilation equipment.

Getting a meal here is challenging. You can settle for udon noodle soup, or sushi (ordered by pointing at plastic models), but if you want a more complicated meal, there’s no telling what you’ll get. Today, expecting to get some tame sushi-style octopus, I hooked into a mound of slug-slimy raw octopus with a puree of white vegetable tasting like horseradish and bearing the taffy-like consistency of ice-cream, this vegetable matter also glistening with slime. I chewed some of the octopus for awhile, and when it showed no sign of giving way, I spit it into a napkin. Tried another piece with same result. A memorable dish. I could really lose some weight here.

There’s a great blocks-long roofed market we walk through every day. Amazing pickles: they pickle just about anything in Kyoto. Lots of dried fish, and beautiful fresh fish. Not much meat to be seen. Some nice looking fruit, selected and polished like art works, and priced accordingly. Saw three mushrooms going for $500. I could really lose some weight here.

The most “real Japan” place we’ve seen so far as been the house of the potter Kawai Kanjiro. Really peaceful in there, with that Zen vibe.

We hit the Kyoto National Museum, too, kind of a disappointment compared to my memories of the Tokyo version. All the “paintings” were black and white. Dude!

They have a special show of Shogun-era colored paintings of gnarly clouds and trees, but it was closed—I did see a lot of these as murals on the paper walls in Nijo Castle, murals from the 17th C, no less.

I can’t get enough of this kiddie Kat. So many signals to sort out here. I have no idea, really. Tourist blogs are quite suspect, I know. You swoop in for a week, make some superficial observations, experience a moment or two of bliss, draw your vast conclusions. Maybe I won’t have any tidy boxed conclusions.