Collected Essays (21 page)

Anyway we went across the street to the Tokyo National Museum, and went into the main building. They had a bunch of 7
^th
century Buddha statues, then some 13
^th
century ones, then a room of “enlightenment instruments” that depressingly reminded me of
auugh
dental tools (last night’s gum-cutting only made it hurt more today, of course), things with prongs on the end to pluck out evil, then there was a room with some really great looking pipes, like dope pipes with real long stems decorated amazingly, one finned, one polka-dotted, then a room with helmets, one in the “unusual hairstyle” fashion, with a fake ponytail and mustache of like boar’s hair—what biker wouldn’t want to have that!—then some sword blades, then a door that went out in the back yard, and we could read the Japanese for it, the three characters were the lambda, the double psi, and the square: in out mouth. Then there was a room with old firemen’s clothes, one with a really cool demon face on it I tried to sketch. Back outside we walked through a neighborhood with nothing but motorcycle things: new and used cycles, tires, leathers (Japanese motorcycle leathers, man, is that kinky or what?), then got the subway back “home.”

On the subway there was a teenage boy, and Sylvia said seeing him made her miss our son Rudy. For a fact Rudy has the same skin color as the boy, and the boy’s lips and hands looked like Rudy’s too. It’s funny to be so old, or such a parent, that now teenage boys seem cute and touching. Got a couple of beers from a sidewalk machine, came up to the room to write, wrote this down, and now I’ll move back up into that stuff they call real time.

June 1, 1990, ‘Round Midnite. Dinner with Hiroshi.

‘Twas a most mellow and emotionally salubrious fest with my translator Hiroshi Sakuma and his wife Miyuki (Me + You + Key, she explained). Hiroshi came into the city and took us out to his neighborhood by cab (an unbelievably high cab fare, which he paid alone) where we ate at his favorite restaurant. “It’s low tech,” he kept saying. He’s been eating there every Saturday night for 10 years, he and Miyuki, the little building was a country house someone took apart, no nails involved!, and brought spang into Tokyo. There was a bar there with folks eating at it, a short bar, and a tatami room, and our room, with benches, and that was the size of it. The place is called Kappa-home, the kappa being an imaginary beast of Japanese legend.

Miyuki is a modest wife with a tentative smile; she met Hiroshi at an SF convention when he was at the University of Tokyo and she in high school. He has a ponytail, like the Kabuki guys, traditional though uncommon these days. The historical oscillation of ponytails in and out of fashion in Eastern and Western cultures. The ponytailed men in the Kabuki had seemed to have the tops of their heads in front of the ponytail shaved, though on looking closer, I’d noticed that one of them actually had a cloth cover on the front of his head that only made it look shaved. Sylvia hadn’t noticed the cloth and insisted the guy had really been shaved. We asked Hiroshi and Miyuki about it. Turns out an old-time ponytailed merchant might wear a cloth over the front of his head instead of shaving it, but if it’s a colored cloth it means you are a
pimp
. Was the guy in the Kabuki this morning supposed to be a pimp? I’ll never know.

The food was outrageously wonderful, the freshest most incredible raw seafood you can imagine, including whole, raw, sweet-tasting squid, and some mysterious white slices of…what? Hiroshi explains, “This is the liver of a kind of fish. It tastes like cheese. The fish lives very deep in the sea; he is so large and jellylike that you cannot hold him in your hands. The fishermen hang him upside down and the liver falls out of his mouth.” Kind o’ sets your mouth to waterin’ don’t it? Sylvia liked the liver and the squids a lot. Two other good things were the tempura egg-plant and the raw abalone.

Before we started the sake, the server-woman brought out a big tray with lots of little stoneware cups, all different, and you pick the sake cup you want. Hiroshi’s cup was a silver one brought special to him as a regular client. The sake came from a big white cask with a big ideogram on it.

About the food, Hiroshi said: “We’ve been eating exactly this for 500 years.” The Kappa-home seemed very together, the people happy and relaxed. A seventy year old lady at the bar was drinking and eating, and I instantly imagined her USA counterpart as some shrill, bleached crone of a barfly.

Hiroshi was proud of his translations of the neologisms in
Software
and
Wetware
. He coined the word “
kune-kune
” to stand for “wiggly,” for “stuzzy” he invented “
rin-rin
,” and for “wavy” he used “
nami
”—as in tsunami. “How’s the surf, dude?” “Nami, dude. Way rin-rin.”

June 5, 1990. The Big Buddha.

Sunday, cousin Zsolt and wife Helga took us sightseeing, we got the train down to Kamakura to see a Zen monastery and the Daibutsu (Great Buddha). The monastery was woodsy, be-templed, tourist-thronged. I saw one monk-type guy, with just the great huge grin you’d hope for. I felt some inklings of peace there, looking at a hillside, at a little Zen shrine, at a perfect arrangement of a flower and a few weeds, feeling once again the unity of all things, the loss of body outline, me a jelly pattern in a sea of sensation.

With wife Sylvia in Kyoto, Japan.

The Daibutsu is about sixty feet tall, he was cast in bronze pieces and assembled about 1300. In 1495 a tsunami came a kilometer inland and trashed his temple, but he’s still there. You can go inside him, he has big doors for air in his back. His head has knobs on it standing for hair. His expression is marvel of disengaged compassion.

Our last night in the hotel room, I found two pay-TV channels of Japanese porno. I remember Martin Gardner telling me that the Japanese don’t allow depiction of pubic hair, so what they do in the porno movies is to usually “pixelize” the crotches, meaning that within a disk area, the image is broken into large squares with each square the average of its component pixels. Another, less frequent trick is to shine a bright spotlight on the crotch so that the area “burns out” white in the video. One of the videos was a fake TV show, with the announcers going down on each other, etc. So odd to realize Japanese act
this way
, too, even the little mask-faced women in their beige suits with the big white lacy collars. After watching for awhile, Sylvia was asleep, and I went out and got a late-night bowl of noodles across the street, great noodles, though with the loathsome fungus strips in it like in the department store soup. I asked the counter people and they told me the hideous mildew strips are “namma” which is
bamboo
! not fungus at all. They were a great crew of guys, the noodlers, kind of like a WWII platoon in a movie, with a kid that all the old ones talked to, a bony guy with radar-dish ears, a plump weak-chinned one with a mustache, and a busy cook in the back.

The last thing in Tokyo Monday morning, Sylvia shopped, and I took a subway to The Tokyo Tower, a truly cheesy copy of the Eiffel Tower, with none of the Eiffel’s mass or heart-lifting scale. You take an elevator up 150 meters, and get out, and there is a fish tank with one poor big black carp in it. A fish in a tank in a tower 150 meters above the ground. In my final ride in the subway I’m tired of being the different one, the carp, and I’m glad to be going back home to California, back to being a fish in my home sea.

August 8, 1993. Hello Kitty.

Three years later we went to Japan again, this time on a kind of tour organized by a Tokyo publicity agency called Humanmedia, who lined up a bunch of lectures, magazine interviews, and book-store signings, all of them for pay—enough so that as well as Sylvia, I could bring our eighteen-year-old daughter Isabel along on the trip too.

The biggest attraction for me was that
CA Lab
was part of an art show called “A-Life World” at the Tokyo International Arts Museum.
CA Lab
was nicely installed on ten color laptops resting on a line of music stands, each laptop running a different cellular automaton rule. Some of the rules showed organic pulsing scrolls, some showed tiny scuttling gliders, some showed slowly boiling colors. It was great to see my software there.

A gnarly cellular automaton rule based on a cubic wave equation, actually created with my later CAPOW software.

The museum was out in a suburban part of Tokyo, and before my talk, I had an hour to kill. Right past the museum was a giant building the size of a baseball stadium, only sealed up, and with fanciful towers on it. “That’s Sanrio Puroland,” Yoko had explained to me. “They are the makers of Hello Kitty. It’s a place for children. Like Disneyland.”

Hello Kitty is the groovy little mouthless cat that you see drawn on so many Japanese children’s knapsacks and stationary. In recent years she’s gotten pretty popular in the U.S. as well. She’s so
kawai
(Japanese for “cute”). The strange thing is that, as far as I could find out, there are no Hello Kitty cartoons or comic books. Hello Kitty is simply an icon, like a Smiley face.

Outside the Sanrio Puroland, I was drawn in my the crowd’s excitement and couldn’t stop myself from going it, even though it cost the equivalent of thirty dollars. But I knew it was my journalistic duty to investigate.

Inside the huge sealed building it smelled like the bodies of thousands of people—worse, it smelled like diapers. Lots of toddlers. I was the only Westerner. The guards waved me forward, and I went into a huge dark hall.

There was amplified music, unbelievably loud, playing saccharine disco-type tunes, with many words in English. “Party in Puroland, Everybody Party!” Down on the floor below were people in costumes marching around and around in the circle of an endless parade. One of them was dressed like Hello Kitty. I couldn’t pause to look at first, as young guards in white gloves kept waving me on. I wound up and down flight after flight of undulating stairs, with all the guardrails lined by parents holding young children.

Finally I found a stopping place down near the floor. In the middle of the floor was a central structure like a giant redwood, bedizened with lights, smoke machines, and mechanical bubble blowers. The colored lights glistened on the bubbles in the thick air as the disco roared. “Party in Puroland!” Hello Kitty was twenty feet from me, and next to her was a girl in gold bathing suit and cape, smiling and dancing. But…if this was like Disneyland, where were the rides?

I stumbled off down an empty hall that led away from the spectacle. Behind glass cases were sculptures of laughing trees making candy. And here were a cluster of candy stores, and stores selling Hello Kitty products. I felt sorry for the parents leading their children around in the hideous saccharine din of this Virtual Reality gone wrong.

I made it back out into the fresh air and walked back to the “A-Life World” show. After the stench and noise and visual assault of Puroland, I couldn’t look at the weird A-Life videos anymore. But the realtime computer simulations were still okay. They were really alive, they had their gnarl and sex and death.

That evening, Mr. Arima, Mr. Onouchi, and Mr. Takahashi treated us to a great dinner in a Roppongi restaurant. These were the guys from Humanmedia organizing my gigs. Mr. Arima delivers one of his rare English sentences, “Mr. Onouchi is a heavy drinker.” Mr. Onouchi snaps, “I don’t think so,” and a minute later knocks the sake bottle off the table. Mr. Arima’s hair is wavy from a perm, and there are white cat hairs on his green suit. Sometimes he wears gray pants with white lines on them. When you talk to him, his lips purse out, and if he smiles, one dancing front tooth is at an angle. His oval-lensed wire glasses slide down on his nose. He’s cute and touching. The dinner featured a soup called Frofuki Daikon, or steambath radish.

After dinner, Sylvia, Isabel and I walked around; this is the hippie part of town, the only place you see Westerners. On a big video screen over the street there is the music video of Billy Idol’s song “Cyberpunk.” In front of us, men in white gloves are digging a ditch and putting up little flashing lights. Billy’s chest bursts open and shows wires. The men in white gloves gesture, waving on the passersby.