I am just coming from my visit to Japan, where I exhorted this young nation to take its stand upon the higher ideals of humanity and never to follow the West in its acceptance of...

I had no idea it was such a big deal. We were touring in Japan beforehand and people kept telling us they were flying from Japan to be at Coachella.

has no guts,” doesn’t it?

Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular.

Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya.

As soon as we turn to China, South Korea, Australia, Japan, it will immediately take away a portion of oil from our European colleagues.

Japan has opened a new chapter in its history.

If you don’t have a whole lot of unsatisfied people, the economy stops dead, doesn’t it?

In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren’t enough...

Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going—people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people...

Now you can be a kikei, too.

After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born...

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all...

A lot of people have asked about my year, so I’ve had to reflect; ‘ What really has happened here? I played real well in Japan, got my card in a limited number of starts over...

Sometimes, when we are sad, we have to do the opposite of sad. Sometimes we have to sing.

At the root of Japanese manufacturing lies a feminine delicacy and shyness as well as a childlike curiosity and fantasy-filled worldview.

Japan likewise put her hopes of victory on a different basis from that prevalent in the United States. (…) Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers repeated that...

Because each nation has its own history of thieving and lies and broken faith, therefore there can only flourish international suspicion and jealousy, and international moral shame becomes anæmic to a degree of ludicrousness. The...

[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of...

In Japanese swordsmanship, it is not uncommon to speak of a unity of mind, body, and sword.

From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.

I like all Japan. I like sushi. I like Mt. Fuji.

Tokyo is a very safe city. At night it becomes quiet the way New York never does.

It’s not easy for a young gay fabulous boy in Japan, I should know, that’s why I became a woman.” Momma Nakama

Time is what we have in this life, and how we use it determines what our life is.

One warm morning in July, a ghost came to our breakfast table.

I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.

Japanese universities have a chair system that is a fixed hierarchy. This has its merits when trying to work as a laboratory on one theme. But if you want to do original work you must...

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.

What comes from the heart will go to the heart

[Soetsu Yanagi’s] main criticism of individual craftsmen and modern artists is that they are overproud of their individualism. I think I am right in saying Yanagi’s belief was that the good artist of craftsman has...

This will make Japan the laughingstock of the world. Mizuho and the Tokyo Stock Exchange have shown how weak their compliance and trading systems are.

In Japan, so many emoticons have been created that it’s reasonable to assume Japanese appreciate their convenience more than anyone else.

Purification in Shinto lifts the burden from the shoulders of the individual and washes it away.

Clever lies become matters of self-congratulation. Solemn pledges become a farce—laughable for their very solemnity. The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the...

I’d heard a lot of Asian people were rooting for me, but I had no idea. I was stunned. They were… impassioned, especially compared to Japan. I couldn’t even have anticipated that kind of welcome.

In spite of what most assume, it is surprisingly tough to make the mind and body work together as a unit.

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

To sum up what is most crucial in Japanese political culture: the Japanese have never been encouraged to think that the force of an idea could measure up to the physical forces of a government....

The only other white people we saw during the three days we stayed there were a German couple intent on taking pictures of their stuffed sheep in a variety of locations around the world.

When he appeared before the lord, his lordship was smitten immediately with the boy’s unadorned beauty, like a first glimpse of the moon rising above a distant mountain. The boy’s hair gleamed like the feathers...

Why is it that so many people start to value money so much that they trade in most of the hours and years of their life in order to get it?

When a zashiki warashi came to live with you, good fortune smiled upon the whole house.

Peasants are people without sense or forethought. Therefore, they must not give rice to their wives and children at harvest time, but must save food for the future. They should eat millet, vegetables, and other...

It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.

Directly beneath the Lotus Pond of Paradise lay the lower depths of Hell, and as He peered through the crystalline waters, He could see the River of Three Crossings and the Mountain of Needles as...

I was on one of my world ‘walkabouts.’ It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew...

Constant love despite almost impossible anti-clamix towards this place of the rising sun…

Gift giving is part of the culture no matter where you are and no matter how long you stay.

Girly’ products can spur Japan’s growth in this century every bit as much as, if not more than, the ‘manly’ technologies.