Travel Diaries #14 - Nintendo
I do some sight-seeing and pay my respects at a place I've wanted to visit for a very long time
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First Stop
I drop my bags at the family-run guesthouse where I’m staying, just a few yards from the east bank of the Kamo river. I don’t bother to unpack yet. I haven’t made a substantial list of things to see or do that’ll fill my day as I head out the door, nor do I need one, I’ll do it later. I’m fond of a nap and I didn’t get any sleep on the overnight bus but I’ll do that later too. I make my way to the nearby river that runs alongside the Higashiyama ward where I’m staying, where a lot of the temples and cultural sights in this historic city are to be found. Right now though I’m looking for a small building just off the opposite bank, closer to the modern downtown. It’s a short walking distance, and I’ve memorised the few directions so I don’t have to keep taking out my phone:
go down the river
cross the first bridge
on the far side it’s on your right
The building is located down a quiet city centre side street. Unlike a similar alleyway one might find themselves on in Tokyo, the buildings only go so high. Cyclists glide by, though not in a hurry. There are businesses on either side of the neatly painted tarmac, some shuttered, some open, though I can’t read the vertical signs which might indicate what they trade in, the modest storefronts offering little clue as to what’s inside. There are no other tourists, just some local school children sauntering by. In my mind they wear the gazes of plucky young adventurers as their attention wanders up and around them as they dawdle, a hand on either strap of their backpack. The soft ambience of the neighbourhood puts in mind the pleasant muzak that would play in old Japanese computer games when you’re wandering around a safe little village, though such sentimentality might have been somewhat of a projection.
There it is. The building itself is made from the same exquisite soft red sandstone bricks that I’d later discover much of the city is built with (after I’d made this first stop of course). The doors appear to be locked, and they also look like they lead to nowhere, like they’re cartoon doors you’d wrench open in desperation to escape your pursuer, only to expose a blank brick wall. Next to the doors, an ornate plaque, not in red and white, or blue, like I’d assumed, but in the same dignified shade of Sacramento green as the doors, an English inscription in gold lettering:
PLAYING CARDS – TRADE MARK – THE NINTENDO PLAYING CARD CO. – SHOMEN-DORI OHASHI, KYOTO, JAPAN.
Headquarters
Shortly after I’m standing outside the current headquarters of Nintendo, a couple of subway stops from the previous building, which was their old headquarters when the company was founded in 1889 and made playing cards. Now I’m in a residential suburb, a place that screams softly of solitary brown leaves strewn on the ground and flapping in the wind even though it’s coming into spring time, silent save for the odd distant car, or the memory is quiet at least. There’s a small green area with a playground and swing set, though it’s empty. A bin lorry chugs by, they’re smaller and neater here than the fuming monsters they use at home.
A large white square building with the logo in silver in the familiar font in its upper right corner, framed by a large silvery sky. You could argue it looks like a giant game of Tetris, but that’s a bit of a stretch, and not only is Tetris a third-party product, this place looks like it’s designed to do minimise any and all stimulation of thoughts of computer games. It looks like a back office of a bank, but one where they answer calls and process payments rather than anywhere a customer would ever visit. There are large walls surrounding, so I’ve to stand on my tiptoes to see over, though there’s nothing to see.
Again, there are no other tourists. I’ve a slight unease that I’m lurking in on an international corporation’s business secrets, though I’m hundreds of metres from the windows and I’m sure they’re used to it. I feel like I could get myself in trouble for lurking, though the mood in the air is that my trespassing would be met with a stern lecture, rather than being shot taken upstairs and chained to a radiator and beaten, or shot from the window. I look more like a plane spotter looking on through the chain link fence the far side of the airport than someone engaged in corporate espionage, or even a gaming enthusiast.
There are no Pokemon running around dishing out sweets or free games like Oompa Loompas. No colours, no sounds, no evidence of whatever is being conjured up inside by a team of games magicians. I take some crappy photos and stare at the logo in the upper corner for a while and then walk up the street to a Lawson’s to buy a coffee. I get back on the subway and head back into town.
Childhood Influences
I’d wanted to go to Japan since I was a young child. There was no internet back then, so I don’t remember how I’d ever even heard of the place, though I did at some point become aware of the connection between the computer games I loved so much and the place where they were made. In these days of technological and informational abundance, everything is available everywhere, all of the time, including culture. In the 90’s however, Japan alone was truly the spiritual home of electronics and games and generally weird and futuristic stuff that we hadn’t even dreamed of back then. Its cultures both traditional and modern permeated every aspect of games, from their aesthetic designs to their technological vision. And once I’d figured out the connection between computer games and Japan, I knew I wanted to go there.
The first of many vices I’ve enjoyed in this world was the Nintendo, and the computer game is one art form in which I can say I’ve a solid grounding in the classics: Mario and Tetris; Street Fighter and Goldeneye; Donkey Kong and Pokemon and Final Fantasy. My favourite of all of them was the Legend of Zelda series. The games feature a nominal hero whom you guide on an adventure around a large fantasy world, peering god-like down from above as he wanders up, down, left and right, slashing at monsters and casting magic spells in order to rescue a princess – an archetypal Hero’s Journey-esque quest, quite literal and straightforward in its symbolism, as your character travels around the world overcoming challenges to earn trinkets which grant him wisdom, courage and power.
The adventures themselves were fun, but there was something really appealing to me about the fact that you could interact with the many people who populated these games of your own volition, and that many of them seemed to have nothing of relevance to say in terms of advancing the game’s plot. Instead they’d offer you small bits of trivia or some detail of local history about the fantasy world they inhabited. Final Fantasy VII created a planet so vast and with such a depth of life that it gave the feeling it had existed for thousands of years before your arrival, with even minor and inconsequential characters leading rich lives and routines in and around the moments you stopped to hit the action button beside them.
I loved the fact that through the course of programming, whoever had come up with these games had not only taken the time to program the mundane details of everyday life into these worlds, but that such inefficiency and expression of humour had been allowed to make the final cut of the game – some authority figure had condoned all this mucking about and inefficient chit-chat. For me it added more atmosphere and character to the game than most of the central storyline.
I’d spend hours exploring the worlds of Zelda or the Final Fantasy games, long after the main missions were completed, uncovering all of the fog of war from the maps, speaking to everyone, completing every side quest, and collecting everything there was to be collected. And really all I wanted to do was to arse about the place, to saunter through the game world, having fleeting conversations with minor characters, observing everything in the world and seeing what the game would allow me to do without becoming too attached to the outcomes of it all: I was a gaming flâneur.
The Melancholy of Limitations
Though there was a sense of melancholy that went along with having explored all of the world in the game: knowing that the lives of these minor characters within those games would never change as long as you were there. It may be an inherent feature of any fictional world or story, but the interactive nature of games seems to highlight as much all the things you can’t interact with.
For all their fantastical sense of infinite possibilities, they really just created a problem that they’d seemed to solve in the first place: limits. Due to technical limitations the characters usually only had one or two snippets of pre-programmed dialogue, repeated every time you push the action button beside them. Although they told stories of their lives and bits of folklore, you knew that those lives were only lived in your absence, the history of their world had played out long before you came along, when the computer was switched off – while you were amongst them, they were condemned to a kind of video-game purgatory.
Majora’s Mask brought this melancholy to a whole new level, the plot telling of a repeating three-day cycle which created the feeling that you were taking part in some sort of time-travelling horror movie, all of your efforts being doomed to failure as time repeatedly resets in the game’s story. The ripple effects of your actions are seen as you progress through the game, as characters take on new routines and find themselves progressing through life as you do – though every time three days passes, time is reset. Everybody forgets who you are, your influence goes unacknowledged, nobody cares. They simply repeat the same old dialogue, perform the same old animated movements.
It adds to the sadness as you see the futility of even trying to influence the game world. No-one notices you’re there and nobody knows you are, no matter how much you influence the world, time always resets and your hard work, although evident, is unacknowledged and forgotten about. Your character is a ghost who is saving the world but nobody knows he exists. Your interference in events feels like a guilty secret; a dark and possibly immoral act. As in any tale of time travel, from the Butterfly Effect to Back to the Future, the golden rule is: don’t interfere. You are the solitary human-controlled character, ostensibly a hero but you must remain a tourist, the only one never to truly be part of these worlds you visit.
Going Beyond the Map
Frustrated and forlorn by the limits the game worlds imposed on me, I developed this deep yearning to go off the map, to escape the finite limits of the game world, knowing that I’d learned everything there was to know about it, that I’d explored everywhere there was to explore, and knowing that nothing would change no matter how many objects I collected or people I spoke to or things I blew up. What was the point of it all? Everyone would just stick to their same routines, slowly ambling around the village, their head bobbing up and down in the same repetitive motion, limited to their same sentence or two of dialogue. Nobody ages, nobody grows, nobody dies – and if they do, they can be revived just by turning the machine off, and then back on again.
I learned – through a combination of pre-internet research of games magazines, encyclopaedias and asking my parents – of the influence Japan had on the game worlds themselves, and became fascinated with the aesthetics of the worlds that gave birth to them: Street Fighter II’s karate and sumo wrestlers, Zelda’s temples and villages, Goemon’s bowls of rice and weird kabuki shows. Photos only show you one angle, as do stories and factual articles. They are maps of one highly specific piece of the universe’s territory, maps of one particular perspective of a place. I wanted to know what lay beyond the maps.
Unable to explore any more of the game’s world, I’d scour every last corner of games magazines, as many as I could get my hands on, trying to uncover more bits of lore or information, either about the games, or about their origins. I’d learn that all of these things, despite being in virtual and cartoony game worlds, came from Japan. Maybe beyond their limited maps and levels, these worlds continued on in the country that had birthed them.
When I’d finished poring over the maps, I’d draw my own. And when I got fed up with the games themselves, I’d design my own games, though always frustrated by the limitations of the consoles of the time, and my own age, being too young it seemed to do anything with my creations other than wish they existed, or that I could visit them. When I got fed up reading and re-reading the same games reviews and developer interviews and cultural articles on Japan, I’d copy them out into notebooks, and when I got bored of doing that, I’d start writing my own (despite my limited fourth class imagination and vocabulary not stretching beyond describing Mario Kart as ‘class’).
Life goes on and childhood interests fall by the wayside. Having spent a couple of years designing blueprints of fantastical games on art pads at home, I took to technical drawing in secondary school with relish, before getting incredibly bored and dropping it, the entire ascent and descent of my drawing career spanning about four years, before disappearing forever. My love for writing develops from copywork of games reviews to creative essays and short stories in school, before, like drawing before it, it gets chewed up and discarded, assumed to be something only children do for many years, my attention to it replaced by the so-called ‘real’ world, and the world of office-work.
After some time, life gets in the way once again, except this time I decide to swap the world of office work for the actual real world, and I go on an adventure. Three years later I arrive on an overnight bus to Kyoto Station, from where I make my way to my guesthouse to drop off my bags.
I’ve somewhere I need to be.
Come on Pilgrim
At the green doors to nowhere, I stand and bask in the aura of the place, though I don’t think there’s an actual aura off it, it’s just a word I’ve put on my own satisfaction at being there. I enjoy looking around at the architecture and surrounding streets, observing the quiet life milling about the place as much as I do the building itself. I’m not caught up by fantasies of what it must have been like to have been working away in this very building over a hundred years ago. I don’t even play games anymore.
I’m not overcome by rose-tinted sentimentality for my youth and memories of playing the games that have compelled me to make my way here – before I could do anything else in Kyoto, as if paying my respects before I crossed the threshold – nor am I caught up by waves of adventurous mania to go smashing all the potted plants I find along the street, childhood influences having taken hold of me in a fit of violent rage like many parents feared they would. I just kind of stand there and stare at it, like I’ve gone up to the crib after midnight mass on Christmas Eve. I may have even had my hands wrapped around each other in prayer, an instinctive pose, something my meditation teacher would query the purpose of me doing a week or two later. “I dunno – cos I’m a Christian I guess”, I’d reply with a shrug and a fit of laughter.
It’s not that I came here to visit these buildings specifically, but at the end of the day, I was here because of a childhood obsession with games, that had been shaped and moulded and in turn influenced other things, and evolved over time. People visit America, the UK, France, Ireland – wherever – because of a love of their culture, usually fostered in a long-distance and parasocial relationship through movies, literature, or even just seeing an ad on the telly.
They say the US’s biggest export now is culture, and people worldwide are still drawn to the place, not just for the economic opportunities it affords, but in part simply to live out what the American Dream looks like. They are fascinated – like me – when they arrive and it really does feel just like TV. Some of them might even visit Graceland, the Hollywood sign, or a hot dog vendor at a baseball game. Every year pilgrims travel to Lourdes, or Mecca, or Jerusalem, or walk the Camino de Santiago, or any other number of grand and micro-pilgrimages. Some people go to mass every week, or to a stadium or the local pub every week to cheer on a football team. And then they go about their lives, their ritual complete. The ritual itself is almost inconsequential, it only serves to frame and give context to all that exists outside of it, a station of the cross on the grand pilgrimage of life itself.
Life Goes On
When I return to the guesthouse I take a much-needed nap and try to stretch some knots out of my body. I go for a run along the nearby river – part-exercise and part-exploration – and when I get back I take a shower. I get a bowl of ramen in the restaurant across the road, savouring the heady cloud of meaty broth that steams off it like it’s powering a train. I drop some pins on the map and make some plans for things to do for the day. I check out some temples and take some photos, joining the streams of fellow tourists. I wonder what brought them to Kyoto, or to Japan, or if they’ve ever played the Nintendo. They probably enjoy sushi, or saw some pictures of cherry blossoms on Instagram.
Later that night I go out and drink all I can drink at an all-you-can-drink sake bar. Half steamed, I wander down the street into a cool pub with a karaoke machine (of course) and murder an Outkast song with some Japanese girls. One of them gives me her phone number before they leave, but when I text her later, the reply comes back in Japanese characters, in which I am illiterate, and I get no further response. I walk around downtown Kyoto for a bit, my attention wandering up and around me as I dawdle, a hand on either strap of my backpack, before walking home again along the river. I never really think about the Nintendo building again.
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