For our last day of sightseeing, we go to the Toji temple in southern Kyoto. They have a flea market on the temple grounds on the 21st of every month, the date has to do with the number of buddhas, bodhisattvas, fierce kings, guardian kings, etc. that play a role in this sect’s heavenly cosmology.

After nearly two weeks here I get a feeling of melting into the throngs of humanity. Even though I’m different. Actually, I’m starting to wish I was Japanese. They’re such beautiful people; when I see another Westerner I’m reminded of how big and awkward I am. The crowd at the temple is like lava. On the steps a censer burns incense, and there’s a steady patter of small coins being tossed into the alms bin at the top of the steps.

We buy a ticket to go inside the temple, and there he is, the infinitely compassionate Buddha. I get this rising feeling inside me like I’m coming apart, dissolving into the temple, merging into the bars of sunlight in the scrolls of smoke, the scuff of feet, the murmur of voices, the dust, the antiquity, the dry wood. I feel like crying. I’ve found what I came for. I’m seeing God. The ecstasy of travel. It’s like being a monk starving in a cell and after ten days the visions come, only the other way around, that is, you’re glutting yourself with sensation until, blessedly, you snap.

Outside is a pagoda in a garden. So beautiful. Fall just coming on Kyoto. In another couple of weeks the Japanese maples will turn red and we tourists will go absolutely daffy! Already you can buy red maple leaves in the market’s pricy fruit stores. Saw a bunch of grapes for $12. A platonic bunch of grapes, each grape large and round and plump. I settled for a Platonic Asian pear at $3. The pear is god.

A pair of apprentice geisha are out together, maikos, taking pictures like everyone else. I have this idea maikos might be country girls who are kind of roped into this not-so-desirable or pleasant kind of life. Being polite to businessmen.

The really beautiful women you see on the street aren’t gonna seek careers as maikos or geishas. They can do better. By the way, I really disliked the movie, Memoirs of a Geisha—I watched it just before leaving as it’s supposedly set in Kyoto. I mean, the movies is very nice to look at, but the story-line: ugh. A woman spends her life pining to be the mistress of an older man who bought here a cherry-syrup sno-cone when she was twelve? Puh-leeze. And, even though Gong Li is one of the greatest actresses ever, why didn’t Hollywood give some Japanese actresses a shot at the starring roles for this flick?

Back to the Toji temple. Sylvia and I get udon soup under a tent in the flea-market. Probably not something I’d do in many other countries. But the Japanese seem so clean and tidy, you feel safe with the street food. The cooks are working over burners, and guys are washing the bowls off in a tub in back. Shared pots of tea on every table. I really feel like part of it all, like a cell in an organism, with the crowd flowing past the tent. “Darshan” is the Indian word meaning the pleasure of being part of a large crowd.

The guy my age sitting on the next table with his son and granddaughters keeps refilling my cup with tea, never meeting my eyes. I think in Japan it’s not polite to look strangers in the face. He’s wearing a brown suit and one of the those stingy-brim rain-hats they like here. When he leaves he finally looks over, smiles at me and says “Good-bye.” I realize he’s been having fun filling my cup. Darshan.

The gardeners really go after the plants here, there’s a word “ikebana” that means, I think, “pruning.” Three guys in this one tree, pruning it artfully. At home when I get my trees trimmed, it’s more a matter of blind chainsawing. Here it’s much more surgical, more thought-out. I’m tempted to get to work on my garden at home, big-time. Hard to get up high into the trees, though.

In the afternoon of the last day, I take a cab alone, seeking one last rock garden, at the Nansenzi Zen temple on the east of Kyoto up against the green hills.

I find a different style of rock garden here, with a little bit of stuff growing in it. I sit here for quite some time, taking in the clumps of leaves, the moss in the gravel, the aches in my tour-worn old body, the slow passing of time, everything so perfectly in place, and my usual worries about things to come are just more rocks in the garden. I rake around them, sit back, let the air drift, feel the moss grow. For the second time in the day, I’m feeling a welling up of religious excitement.

Moving deeper into the gardens, I cross an artful path across a pond, everything off-handedly where it should be. Wu wei, no sweat, no matter, never mind.

I come to a magical Zen fountain that’s dripping one or two drops every second or so into a rock basin, the drops are thoughts, souls, instants, ripples in the bowl. Above the fountain is an unbelievably crooked tree, supported on two crutches. By now my psychic weather is like the rising tide of music in “Day in the Life.” This is how I imagine the pre-epileptic-fit aura might feel, like for Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin.

But—what’s that bright green spot in the rock basin? My god, some pinhead has submerged a plastic bonsai tree here in this utterly natural and authentic Zen fountain! A tourist? A Japanese Beavis and Butthead? A monk? What does this prickly bright green plastic object mean? For sure it’s a discordant honk in my garden of serenity. I rake my thoughts around it, doing my best to fit it in. But, dude, it’s busting my rush. I fish the plastic tree out of the basin and examine it with contempt. Rigid, bristly, nasty green.

Should I hurl the bogus bonsai into the nearby koi pond? But it’s hardly my place to come here and rearrange things during the nanosecond duration of my visit, is it?

[Hand-woven obi in a factory store in the textile district of Kyoto.]

Distracted by the bogus bonsai, I forget all about satori and start fretting over whether I should have bought that expensive Kyoto-silk shirt with the perhaps too-flashy koi patterns last night. I’m coming down again. I put the bonsai back and the basin and beat a retreat to the rock garden and dig it again.

And then I begin worrying I should see more. The temple goes on and on, there’s more rock gardens than the first one. Of course the first one was the best. Ah, why am I looking for newer, better, more?

One of the gardens further on has a speaker talking like at Ryoanji. Everywhere you go in Japan things are talking to you. The elevators, the buses, the stairs, the arcades in the streets, often in small, high-pitched voices—Sylvia and I call those “good doll” voices, we noticed them last time we were in Japan. I remember fantasizing that I’d get home and there’d be a good doll voice in my car, some good doll silp would have stowed away like the new-spawned invader hiding in the lifeboat ship in Alien. But what do I know? Nothing. Ah…nothing, yes, yes, that’s what I wanted to know. To not know. To knot now.

Good-bye monks. These guys really know. They have shoes like boats. They’re about to do the tea-blessing ceremony that’ll look like a funeral.

Good-bye “real Japan.” A whole lot of the Japan I saw looks more like this than like a Zen garden, not that I ever got outside of downtown Kyoto. Not many trees on the streets. I’m glad I have fairly easy access to nature. Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz as the ultimate Zen rock garden. The art of the Zen garden is squeezing Four Mile beach into your backyard. It’s like the bite-sized Japanese food that you get a kaiseki banquet. You make the most of it, the small size makes it manageable, and you can really focus on it. But, really, I like the big nature I can walk around in, and it’s not roped off. By now I’m totally itching to go camp in Point Reyes or Big Sur.

Good-bye drop-dead chic shoppers. One more thing I noticed about the Japanese women’s body language: they very often stand pigeon-toed. I remember loving how Elvis Costello stood pigeon-toed on his first album cover. The AC/DC guy used to do that a lot, too. Angus. The pair in this picture were attending a wedding in a restaurant, all the guests had shopping bags of presents they’d received as party favors. You see a lot of elderly people on the streets, too, though I didn’t take many pictures of them. Today we saw a woman riding by with an umbrella mounted on her bike. A special stand to hold the umbrella upright. Using it as a parasol, on a sunny autumn day.

Sunset glint. There’s some nice canals in Kyoto, filled with wonderfully clear water, right out of the mountains. We ate French pastry by this canal. There’s a fad for French food in Kyoto, though they don’t exactly grasp how to do things with dairy products, so things like pastry cream, cheese cake, or ice cream all taste a bit odd. Like art painted by a blind man. All the cooking experience is with the bean. There’s a special skin of soy-bean milk called yuba, greatly esteemed, and they even make candy out of beans.

(From a kimono in the Kyoto National museum.)

So now it’s over, another milestone come and gone, whoosh, the train across the hidden valley and back into another tunnel. I’m on the plane flying East from the Far East—to Californee! Back to my fellow nectar-sipping butterfly beings.

And, last but never least, good-bye cuttlefish. The last evening we had a medium priced kaiseki dinner where they served some cuttlefish sashimi. Finally I’m eating one of these fellows I’m always writing about. They taste like, um, white plastic. The steamed giant radish was much better, not to mention the broiled herring and the bean candy. Nothing ever quite what I expected. What a trip.

Sayonara, y’all.

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!