Quotes About Japan

Japan even has beds that hold me.

There were flurries of concern in the West when shells landed on foreign concessions or threatened ships. But, as in Manchuria, nobody would take practical steps to hold back Japan even when its army landed at the end of February and marched in to bolster the lacklustre marines.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

All of those cases were clearly marked on the side in English: U.S.A. FOOD RELIEF It was indeed the very same food donated by Americans to Japan before the war. The Japanese military government had stolen it from their own hungry people.

I will never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the Fall and the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is a glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, so that in some of those gardens you don't know where nature begins and art ends—this was a tremendous experience.

For years now, we've been hearing about how China is the great copycat nation, the manufacturer of designs drawn up in other countries, and then an imitator for its own products. That's been true, as the developing country followed a path that Japan and then Korea plowed before it.

When Paul was arrested in Japan for having hash in his luggage, I thought he'd be out that night. But it became really serious stuff when he was kept in a cell. I became more fearful as the days went by.

With Germany conquered, the Kremlin checkmated, Japan converted, it became easier - safer - to peek around looking for someone to fear... and maybe do something about. Ideally, somebody far away, from a country about which almost nothing was known.

Another dynamic of this last year was our increased penetration into the Japanese market.

When I used to fight in Japan, I was popular there and people asked me for pictures and it was nice, and when I came home no one knew who I was. That was the perfect life.

The constitution has thus ended up not as Japan's ultimate governing legal document, but in the grand political Japanese tradition as a somewhat blurred and compromised token of legitimacy, hoisted about erratically like a portable shrine by competing contenders for power.

I do not for a moment suggest that Japan should be unmindful of acquiring modern weapons of self-protection. But this should never be allowed to go beyond her instinct of self-preservation. She must know that the real power is not in the weapons themselves, but in the man who wields those weapons

Japan will help vulnerable developing nations make progress on emissions. In fact, we pledged assistance of about $16 billion over three years from 2013 and met this goal in about a year and a half.

A movie of mine is going to be released in Japan next year. I play a waitress who's a really regular girl in this movie. The English title isn't decided yet, but in Japanese it's I'll Get on the A Train Sometime.

Japan is brilliant for vinyl. There's all this rare stuff that I've been looking two years for, and you walk into a store, and you find it straight away.

The role of Italy and of Austria has diminished as has that of France and Britain; Germany and Japan have suffered catastrophically.

There's the assumption being made by the national security advisers to the Obama administration that the North Korean leadership is not suicidal, that they know they will be obliterated if they attacked the United States. But I would point that everything in South Korea and Japan is well within range of what they might want to do.

Moving away from studies, what of real world feedback? In West Germany, rape rates have slightly declined since 1973, when pornography became widely available; meanwhile, other violent crime has increased. In Japan, where pornography depicting violence is widely available, rape is much lower per capita than in the United States, where violence in porn is restricted.

For economists, Argentina is a perplexing country. To illustrate how difficult it was to understand Argentina, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Simon Kuznets once famously remarked that there were four sorts of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.

Japan had held 132,134 western POWs and 35,756 of them died in detention, a death rate of 27 percent. In contrast, only 4 percent of the POWs held by the Germans and Italians died.

Japan was taming her own Wild West as the Americans had theirs: by bringing the light of civilization through divine war against a barbaric enemy.

Do you remember my friend Fumiko Kobayashi? She loaned me a book by a university professor named Taki Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behaviour, and she writes that death, particularly voluntary death, is surrounded in this country by a heroic, romantic, aesthetic and emotional aura. She says we often find it hard to communicate and use suicide to make our ideas, or beliefs, or sufferings known. I don't know whether I believe that or not.

This country's in the grips of total pandemonium. All over Japan, it's as if eighty million people had simultaneously gone out of their minds. Staple foods are either rationed or else completely unavailable, and the distribution always seems to be running behind schedule. On top of that, the authorities have cracked down on hoarding, and anyone caught laying in supplies is ruthlessly punished.

Japan had always had a thriving sex trade, but this was different. Before the war there had been a few streetwalkers in the seamier parts of town, but most of the prostitution was carried on in designated brothels, behind closed doors, with a certain decadent élan. Now, though, there were hordes of women standing around all the major train stations hoping to rent their bodies to some stranger for an hour or two, simply because they could find no other way to support themselves.