The Japanese bureaucracy is unique. It is also very powerful, although it is now the object of so much criticism. Many of Japans brightest made it a pillar of strength and continuity.

I do not want to be bored listening to music that is muffled and known only to the poet himself.

Life is always sad. That's what makes suicide so tempting because life is all that we really have and haven't. Death makes us equals, too, because the foul and the good all die. The past, the present, and the future-what escape is there from these? None-and yet sometimes we are life's happy victims.

The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.

You will find that our enemies are our own kin. It is they who betray us. So learn this most important lesson-in the end, our worst enemy is ourselves

We are shallow because we are mayabang, ego driven, and do not have the humility to understand that we are only human, much too human to mistake knowledge for wisdom.

November is auspicious in so many parts of the country: the rice harvest is already in, the weather starts to cool, and the festive glow which precedes Christmas has began to brighten the landscape.