Nintendo Corporation, Ltd.’s headquarters are my holy land. That hallowed ground in Kyoto, Japan is to me what Mecca is to Muslims, what the Vatican is to Catholics, what New Amsterdam’s red light district is to potheads. I won’t deny it: the pilgrimage to Nintendo’s corporate office building is the reason I came to Japan as a student for a quarter.

After spending the first eight hours of Sept. 17 touring Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples — fascinating in themselves — I convinced two of our Japanese student guides to lead a party of eight fellow UC students to pay tribute at Nintendo’s gates. At the Japanese consulate general in San Francisco, I had earlier looked up Nintendo’s phone number and address in a Kyoto telephone directory. But when our guides Taro and Miho (pronounced like the milk tea flavor and the Spanish word for “my son,” respectively) inquired at the information desk near the subway station, they discovered that my information was wrong; Nintendo moved their offices in 2002.

An American clerk would’ve laughed at me, the hapless foreigner who can’t speak the language, and told me to find a newer phone book. But I’m not in America, I’m in Japan — land of excessive politeness and refined customer service, where store clerks don’t just greet you at the door, a la Wal Mart, but actually sing you a “welcome” song as they stock the shelves and sweep the floors.

True to form, this helpful information desk clerk spent 15 minutes researching Nintendo’s new address and phone number, as well as the proper subway route to get us there.

Miho called the number, and I told her to tell the Nintendo receptionist that I ran for governor, that I had been the opinion editor of a San Diego newspaper, that I had an American TV show and that I needed to interview Miyamoto for any one of those outlets, anything to convince them I was worth Miyamoto’s time.

It didn’t work: All visitors needed an appointment. But that wasn’t going to stop me.

We ran toward the subway. It was five minutes before 5 p.m.; our primary goal — meeting Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of “Super Mario Bros.” — might be rendered irrelevant if the workday had already ended. But Miyamoto-san was rumored to ride his bike to work, making an encounter all the more likely. Hoping that we could still catch him on his way out, we dashed to the subway and were soon joined by more UC students from another shrine-touring group. Some of us way more excited than others, we boarded the train.

The arrival station was three blocks away from the 12-story building. Taro and Miho led us toward it. Under my strict orders to point out bicyclists in the hope that I might recognize Miyamoto on his ride home from work, the group started jogging. When we turned down an alley and I caught a glimpse of the Nintendo logo on the top of the building, I took off sprinting toward it, always mindful of the bicyclists — each of whom was potentially my hero.

I reached the end of the alley and stopped in my tracks.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit….”

It was Nintendo. I had waited a decade and a half for this moment.

The others caught up with me when I got to the front gate. The Japanese students and I approached the security guard’s window inside the “castle walls.” I asked the guard if we could see Miyamoto; My Son and Milk Tea translated. The guard said no, that an appointment was required.

Hoping just to get inside the building for a peek, I motioned toward the front door. He pointed at a 3-by-5 index card taped to the counter, prepared for just this sort of occasion: “I am sorry, you can not go in there.”

Funny that there are enough English-speaking Nintendo worshippers that such a sign is necessary.

A few more pathetically unsuccessful pleadings later (“Taro! Tell him I work for a newspaper in San Diego. Tell him I need to interview Miyamoto for an American TV show. Tell him I ran for governor!”), we resigned ourselves to sitting outside the gate. I took note of each passing Nintendo employee, but recognized none as Miyamoto.

Growing restless, my comrades started to leave. Suddenly, three business suit-clad Nintendo employees marched out the front gate. They weren’t just any men blessed to work for the greatest company in the history of the world — they were Miyamoto’s personal underlings, who wanted to personally apologize for Miyamoto being too busy to see us. The man himself had seen us through the window and sent them down.

Now that I knew that Miyamoto had seen me, I was confident that he would surely talk to us if we waited there just a bit longer. A friend and I continued the vigil as the rest of the group headed back to the subway.

Eventually, the other Nintendo worker bees started talking to us. I asked one American-looking employee about Miyamoto’s whereabouts and approximate time that he usually left work. “Around midnight, probably,” was her reply. It was 8 p.m. at this point, and I wasn’t prepared to camp out until midnight.

Telling her about the great significance Nintendo holds in my life doubtlessly made me sound a tad out of touch with reality (“This is my Mecca — it’s a dream come true just to be here; I know everything about the company history from reading and rereading a 500-page book about Nintendo; when I was six years old I knew I wanted to meet the man who created ‘Super Mario’”), but she worked at the place, so she must have felt at least a little of the magic that permeated the area.

Soon after we bid her adieu, a portly man with glasses and a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket walked up and tried to talk to us. Brave of him, considering he knew about as much English as we knew Japanese. We said the single word that communicated our reason for being there: “Miyamoto-san!”

The man told us that Miyamoto is “very busy,” which we knew, then went to fetch an English translator who told us, again, that Miyamoto was very busy making dreams come true and that we most likely wouldn’t be able to meet him.

“I understand,” I said. “But is there any way we could get a tour of the building?”

He mumbled something about company secrets. Bah. I know all their secrets.

“Okay, yes, I know Nintendo is very secretive. Are there any brochures or anything we could get?”

A quick conversation in Japanese with his cohort and a short wait later, during which we enthralled him with tales of how much I love Nintendo, yielded the closest thing to the Holy Grail we could hope for under the circumstances: the 2004 Nintendo Annual Company Report for stockholders, in both English and Japanese. Filled with glossy photographs of the latest Nintendo products and the company’s full financial forecast, it was enough to appease me into going home, but not before I convinced him to hand deliver a personal letter to Miyamoto himself.

I arigato’d the heck out of the guy, took a photo with him, then left for the subway, content with the knowledge that Shigeru Miyamoto has my name, address and Japanese cell phone number.