The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.

After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.

In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of...

We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.

The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and...

Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.

What was more, Japan was driven into isolation from other Asian countries, not only politically but also socially and culturally.

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.

The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also...

After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.

Of course I would not presume to rank myself with the poetic genius Yeats. I am merely a humble follower living in a country far removed from his.

For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or of radioactivity that even the Chugoku Shinbun, the major newspaper of the city where the atomic...

By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never...

On the other hand, the culture of modern Japan, which implied being thoroughly open to the West or at least that impeded understanding by the West.

Hiroshima is like a nakedly exposed wound inflicted on all mankind.

During the last few years I have been engaged in writing a trilogy which I wish to be the culmination of my literary activities.

Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries.

We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to...

Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters.

The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.

It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.

From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan’s prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at...

The moral props for Japanese aspiring to such a rebirth were the idea of democracy and their determination never to wage a war again.

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can’t make decisions about himself as neatly as all that,” Himiko said, elaborating her friend’s terrific prophecy; ” You won’t get a divorce Bird. You’ll justify...

However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.

When the Russian delegate this summer indicated the Soviet Union’s interest in sending medical equipment, Dr Shigeto went right away to see the delegate and settle the matter tactfully. He is careful to steer clear...

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of...

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.