Japan Quotes

Everything can draw inspiration: a vintage cloth, a book, a street-when I was in Japan, I was deeply inspired by Japanese pharmacies.

In most places that are rich in guitar culture, everyone uses their fingers, like in Spain or Africa. In Japan there are string instruments played that way. It is not until you get in the States that you find people using picks.

All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There's really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

I lost about 60 pounds. I don't really have a moment specifically that made me do it. I remember little things, like, when I was in Japan, I remember looking around at the portion sizes of a fast food restaurant and being like, 'Well, this has something to do with it.' Americans definitely eat too much.

By the way, Japan is also known to be actively engaged in manned space flights as part of the International Space Station.

Japan is already a leader in energy efficiency, and it has a wealth of innovative technologies. We must put this expertise to use creating a model for growth and sustainability that we can share with the world.

Another question has been raised rather widely in Europe, in Japan as well as in the United States is what, to what extent will the euro become a reserve currency.

There are two types of depreciation. There is one where you're manipulating currencies. And that's not what Japan is doing.

Nobody likes being criticised, particularly by players who will be in Disneyland this summer on their holidays rather than the World Cup in Japan

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven't belonged to any company or any system. It isn't easy to live like this in Japan.

The saddest thing one meets is a nominal Christian. I had not seen it in Japan where missions is younger. The church here is a “field full of wheat and tares.

Russia, China, Japan, Mexico, all countries will respect America far more when I'm leading it, far more than they do under past administrations.

Japan used to beat China routinely in wars. You know that, right? Japan used to beat China, they routinely beat China. Why are we defending? You know the pact we have with Japan is interesting. Because if somebody attacks us, Japan does not have to help.If somebody attacks Japan, we have to help Japan.

[People] are tired of being ripped off by every single country that does business with us. Whether it's China, Japan, Mexico, Vietnam.

I can take pot or leave it. I got busted in Japan for it. I was nine days without it and there wasn't a hint of withdrawal, nothing.

Every country that meets Buddhism molds it into their own indigenous religion, as America will. A very clear example of this is Japan, which threw out almost all the dharma, and just kept that essence, which spoke to them.

Undoubtedly Internet has reduced the possibilities of taxation. Why should I buy something here if I can buy it from a company in Japan or England or Brazil with a lower tax?

During my travels in Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Europe and all over the United States, I have seen and heard the voices of people who want change. They want the stabilization of the economy, education and healthcare for all, renewable energy and an environmental vision with an eye on generations to come.

One of the real challenges, since we're working in so many places - Mexico, Japan, Brazil - is understanding variations, both in terms of culture and context.

If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.

If you look at China - and frankly, Vietnam now is doing a big number, and you look at Japan and India and Mexico - Mexico's killing us at the border and they're killing us with trade.

My total focus was on building up our military, building up our strength, building up our borders, making sure that China, Japan, Mexico, both at the border and in trade, no longer takes advantage of our country.

Japan admitted the Imperial Army ordered the building of these brothels and the trafficking of the women. And now that it's been 70 years, there are only 46 remaining comfort women still alive in South Korea. So also in this deal, Japan is going to pay 1 billion yen - that's about 8 million U.S. dollars - to provide social services and health care to the surviving victims.

If you take skinny jeans - skinny jeans didn't just happen in the US, they were happening in Japan, they were happening in the UK, they were happening everywhere. Some places a little faster than others. But, if we look at our best sellers in this store, they're the same best sellers that we have in the States.

Well, that's the old story I heard about the Jackie Chan films. That, like, Jackie Chan will just keep going and when crew members drop he just replaces them. I don't know if that's true but after having worked in Japan I believe it might be true.

I can't tell you how important it was for us to be successful in japan.

Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away—I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn’t that far away. If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

I was in Los Angeles. I saw the biggest ships you have ever seen with cars pouring off from Japan, into Los Angeles. Just pouring off these ships, and I am saying to myself, we send them beef, it's a tiny fraction, and, by the way, they don't even want it, they have to fight in order to take it in because they don't even want it, and it's very perishable, they'll send it back, they'll find reasons not to take it. And yet the ships, the boats, the ships are loaded up with cars, thousands of cars and they are just pouring off.

I love eating shabu-shabu in Japan - a kind of beef hotpot. But if you're talking about authentic, traditional food, then Italian cooking is one of the best in the world.

Stay away from Europe, stay away from Japan, Australia. If you go to the Western world, you're gonna pay more money. You can spend five months in Bali for what you'd spend in one month in Europe.

I am busy touring all over Europe, Japan, and Australia.

In Japan, Australia, and England there is such a strong youth culture.

The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia

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 large.

We represent companies from around the world who say, "I want to look at Japanese companies. I want to invest in Japan."

We can take our Japanese clients around the world. We can take them to Brazil, Europe, anywhere. And we also take companies from around the world into Japan.

Part of [Japanese companies] growing and expanding around the world is ... going to help the Japanese keep their lifestyles [despite Japan's] demographics, as a declining population, and [to] make it more conducive to women to go to work, I think, is a plus.

For decades, Japan has been a friend and reliable trading partner with the United States, and I anticipate that relationship will prosper.

The new fans of Japan won’t be Orientalists, but they will be anime-savvy.

I believe that the civilization India evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors, Rome went, Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken; Japan has become Westernized; of China nothing can be said; but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation.

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

In a free country, America, or India, and Japan, and many places, democracy country, free country, but still within the sort of rule of law, some injustice, some sort of problems, some discrimination, and also some sort of scandals or the corruptions. These things, you see, they are always in my mind, I think many people agree, lack of moral principle.

A handful of men working within the Zen sect of Buddhism created gardens in fifteenth-century Japan which were, and still are, far more than merely an aesthetic expression. And what is left of the earlier Mogul gardens in India suggests that their makers were acquainted with what lay behind the flowering of the Sufi movement in High Asia and so sought to add further dimensions to their garden scenes.

The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

Japan suffered terribly from the atomic bomb but never adopted a pose of moral superiority, implying: 'We would never have done it!' The Japanese know perfectly well they would have used it had they had it. They accept the idea that war is war; they give no quarter and accept none. Total war, they recognize, knows no Queensberry Rules. If you develop a devastating new weapon during a total war, you use it; you do not put it into the War Museum.

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... In being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.

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 restoration of peace in various parts of the world.

Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.