I idly wonder as people bike past me if they know why I am here, if they can even grasp that a few foreigners would come all the way out to photograph themselves standing in front of some offices. At what point can people smell it on me? The first train to catch the transfer? The second? When we get off at our stop? As we proceed across the bridge? I am a woman in the Mel Gibson movie What Women Want, and everyone in Kyoto is Mel Gibson. A dog on a leash trots past with a plastic bottle in its mouth. The dog is also Mel Gibson.
First I notice that Brenden's a couple steps ahead of me. Then it seems like things are moving faster. I've assumed the speed-walk without even realizing it. We are both pushing toward the goal, no place of gifts or treasures, just a non-descript and totally ordinary building that we've each travelled halfway around the world to see.
Well, not exactly. We're day-tripping in Kyoto by matter of circumstance, and it occurs to us, though not without a bit of pre-trip bemusement, that it would be completely possible for us to see the very concrete bunker in which our personal pseudo-celebrities do their thing: Nintendo's Japanese headquarters, nestled in-between two totally ordinary convenience stores and a wine shop.
Any deranged enough Nintendo fan will tell you that visiting "Nintendo" is one of their dreams, perhaps not coming to terms with the fact that like Reebok, K-Mart, and Louis Vuitton, Nintendo is just a company that happens to design, manufacture, and sell products. In truth, they all do it about the same, only Nintendo doesn't design shoes or dish towels—they design tiny monsters and colorful worlds. At one point during the day, I tell Brenden that I am stupidly excited to go see the Nintendo building, and he says he is too, and I say that I mean both that it is stupid how excited I am, in a good way, and that also it is very stupid that I am excited at all, which is obviously true.
We figure, visiting Nintendo will be like visiting a parking garage we cannot enter, merely to say we have been to that parking garage. With this logic and reason in hand, we proceed through the ticket gates.
After a jaunt-and-a-half from the JR Kyoto station, we set out and grab the impression that this is a part of town the tourists probably don't often frequent. Immediately after exiting the gates, and just past a nearby coffee shop (closed), we see some oval-framed letters on top of a tile white building at the end of a powerline-filled alley, electrical cables strung up like holiday streamers from wall to wall. This is the Nintendo research center, where I excitedly imagine a variety of people are sitting around at tables drawing pictures of Fox McCloud and playing with prototype dog-grooming hardware.
Further down the street and across a couple of bridges we can see it, the big one on the horizon, our cube, and a view I didn't really know you could catch: a narrow section of the main building rising up from the top bears Nintendo's Japanese logo in three big blue kanji: 任天堂.
The streets are lined with old apartment buildings, bookended by small ramen shops, and lorded over by an enormous pachinko parlor, where my mental image of Hiroshi Yamauchi sits, a crochety old man in the corner with a metal bottlecap wedged into the launch lever on his Koda Kumi machine, telling her to shake it baby, cigarette hanging from his mouth. We make our initial approach via a back alley, and there it is, guarded by some plain metal gates and a security camera. We presume the pictures they took of us standing there like doofuses look something like the ones we took.
Around in the front, outside the main gates at about seven in the evening, various groups of workers mill about by the security guard booth, wearing matching Nintendo-branded button-ups. Some of them are decked out with headsets or side-slung keitai, and nearly all of them sport declaratory lanyards: I'm from Nintendo, and here is my photograph. We get a good look at the place, the only distinguishing marks being the alphabetic Nintendo lettering on each upper corner of the building. I can see some lights on inside. Are they having really exciting meetings? From inside the 7-11, I watch one of the employees cross the street and enter, then grab a bottle of tea and head to the register. Nintendo workers require liquid to survive, just like me!
I buy a can of beer, a piece of string cheese, and a small candy bar called "Black Thunder." Outside the 7-11, we take extreme close-up photographs of ourselves with the building in the background, saying to the world "Look, there's a building back there that says Nintendo on it, and see? I'm here too, can you believe it?" Brenden eats some ice cream called Parm. It is definitely my favorite Japanese ice cream. As we pass by the wine shop I assert that Mr. Miyamoto has almost definitely purchased wine from this wine shop. It only stands to reason, he's been with the company at this building for years, and here is the wine shop, and they are right next to each other!
On the train ride home we decide we really should have taken our visit book, filled with calligraphy art from various temples, up to the security guard, and talked him into writing a bunch of crap and peppering the page with parking validation stamps and hanko seals. We would have said in our most polite broken Japanese that this building is our temple, and asked him to please write something. He would have joyfully obliged and created artwork not unlike that of the temple monks! Of course.
On the way back to Kobe, in my quiet moments between Ashiya and Amagasaki, I imagine a Japanese tourist going to the McDonald's headquarters in Beeftown, America, and asking the security guard in broken English to please sign his autograph book, which already has the signatures of John Wayne, Bill Clinton, and Superman, and to please sign it as "McDonald." The situation suddenly seems peculiar and touching, which I imagine are about the only two words you can use to describe it.
First I notice that Brenden's a couple steps ahead of me. Then it seems like things are moving faster. I've assumed the speed-walk without even realizing it. We are both pushing toward the goal, no place of gifts or treasures, just a non-descript and totally ordinary building that we've each travelled halfway around the world to see.
Well, not exactly. We're day-tripping in Kyoto by matter of circumstance, and it occurs to us, though not without a bit of pre-trip bemusement, that it would be completely possible for us to see the very concrete bunker in which our personal pseudo-celebrities do their thing: Nintendo's Japanese headquarters, nestled in-between two totally ordinary convenience stores and a wine shop.
Any deranged enough Nintendo fan will tell you that visiting "Nintendo" is one of their dreams, perhaps not coming to terms with the fact that like Reebok, K-Mart, and Louis Vuitton, Nintendo is just a company that happens to design, manufacture, and sell products. In truth, they all do it about the same, only Nintendo doesn't design shoes or dish towels—they design tiny monsters and colorful worlds. At one point during the day, I tell Brenden that I am stupidly excited to go see the Nintendo building, and he says he is too, and I say that I mean both that it is stupid how excited I am, in a good way, and that also it is very stupid that I am excited at all, which is obviously true.
We figure, visiting Nintendo will be like visiting a parking garage we cannot enter, merely to say we have been to that parking garage. With this logic and reason in hand, we proceed through the ticket gates.
After a jaunt-and-a-half from the JR Kyoto station, we set out and grab the impression that this is a part of town the tourists probably don't often frequent. Immediately after exiting the gates, and just past a nearby coffee shop (closed), we see some oval-framed letters on top of a tile white building at the end of a powerline-filled alley, electrical cables strung up like holiday streamers from wall to wall. This is the Nintendo research center, where I excitedly imagine a variety of people are sitting around at tables drawing pictures of Fox McCloud and playing with prototype dog-grooming hardware.
Further down the street and across a couple of bridges we can see it, the big one on the horizon, our cube, and a view I didn't really know you could catch: a narrow section of the main building rising up from the top bears Nintendo's Japanese logo in three big blue kanji: 任天堂.
The streets are lined with old apartment buildings, bookended by small ramen shops, and lorded over by an enormous pachinko parlor, where my mental image of Hiroshi Yamauchi sits, a crochety old man in the corner with a metal bottlecap wedged into the launch lever on his Koda Kumi machine, telling her to shake it baby, cigarette hanging from his mouth. We make our initial approach via a back alley, and there it is, guarded by some plain metal gates and a security camera. We presume the pictures they took of us standing there like doofuses look something like the ones we took.
Around in the front, outside the main gates at about seven in the evening, various groups of workers mill about by the security guard booth, wearing matching Nintendo-branded button-ups. Some of them are decked out with headsets or side-slung keitai, and nearly all of them sport declaratory lanyards: I'm from Nintendo, and here is my photograph. We get a good look at the place, the only distinguishing marks being the alphabetic Nintendo lettering on each upper corner of the building. I can see some lights on inside. Are they having really exciting meetings? From inside the 7-11, I watch one of the employees cross the street and enter, then grab a bottle of tea and head to the register. Nintendo workers require liquid to survive, just like me!
I buy a can of beer, a piece of string cheese, and a small candy bar called "Black Thunder." Outside the 7-11, we take extreme close-up photographs of ourselves with the building in the background, saying to the world "Look, there's a building back there that says Nintendo on it, and see? I'm here too, can you believe it?" Brenden eats some ice cream called Parm. It is definitely my favorite Japanese ice cream. As we pass by the wine shop I assert that Mr. Miyamoto has almost definitely purchased wine from this wine shop. It only stands to reason, he's been with the company at this building for years, and here is the wine shop, and they are right next to each other!
On the train ride home we decide we really should have taken our visit book, filled with calligraphy art from various temples, up to the security guard, and talked him into writing a bunch of crap and peppering the page with parking validation stamps and hanko seals. We would have said in our most polite broken Japanese that this building is our temple, and asked him to please write something. He would have joyfully obliged and created artwork not unlike that of the temple monks! Of course.
On the way back to Kobe, in my quiet moments between Ashiya and Amagasaki, I imagine a Japanese tourist going to the McDonald's headquarters in Beeftown, America, and asking the security guard in broken English to please sign his autograph book, which already has the signatures of John Wayne, Bill Clinton, and Superman, and to please sign it as "McDonald." The situation suddenly seems peculiar and touching, which I imagine are about the only two words you can use to describe it.