Doing some completely unrelated surfing, I ran into the term Rhizome Theory), and thought it was the exact kind of thing Uchikoshi would have in his arsenal of oddities, especially because of VLR - I haven't played in a whole, but I do believe I recall some philosophical implications behind the name Rhizome-9.

Anyway, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari used the term rhizome to "describe a process of existence and growth that does not come from a single central point of origin." In Western culture, knowledge has worked like a tree, each branch ultimately connected to the acorn from which the whole sprouts. A rhizome however, does not begin or end anywhere, and even a single cell can spark new growth. According to our duo, this much more accurately represents the Postmodern world - the Internet for example, is definitely more of a rhizome structure than a tree.

I haven't dug in very deeply yet, but did find this quote from Jung that seems to sum up the idea:

"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away–an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains."

Uchikoshi likes to name drop people with unusual ideas (hello, Sheldrake, Robertson, Schrodinger), so I wonder if he was aware of the theory already, or if two people having the same thought separately just provides evidence to the theory.