{"id":455,"date":"2007-10-14T14:47:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-14T22:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/14\/kyoto-2-the-unimation-priest\/"},"modified":"2007-10-14T17:23:59","modified_gmt":"2007-10-15T01:23:59","slug":"kyoto-2-the-unimation-priest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/14\/kyoto-2-the-unimation-priest\/","title":{"rendered":"Kyoto #2. The Unimation Priest."},"content":{"rendered":"

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We wandered around Tokyo yesterday. This little creature is an ad for a store called something like hysteric.<\/p>\n

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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<\/p>\n

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Always admiring the octopi in the market. Tentacle frenzy.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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Everyone layering onto each other, a human collage.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019t turned red yet, which will be a big deal.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019d dressed it up like a Shinto priest or demon, with a robe and a face. This combo seems quite Japanese.<\/p>\n

The robot was moving all the time, turning his head, like the puppets in \u201cKukla, 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.) <\/p>\n

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The utility poles are really overloaded with wires here. I think in the U.S. we put most of them underground. <\/p>\n

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Great patterns of the wires against the sky, dig that helix.<\/p>\n

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Nice walking around with a camera when the right shot jumps out.<\/p>\n

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A store looking like a face…<\/p>\n

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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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}