I don't know how many serious Christians exist here in America, but the Japanese, the younger generation is leaving the Buddhist religion mentality behind.

When people call me a photographer, I always feel like something of a charlatan—at least in Japanese. The word shashin, for photograph, combines the characters sha, meaning to reflect or copy, and shin, meaning truth, hence the photographer seems to entertain grand delusions of portraying truth.

It's pre-photography, a fossilization of time, Americans have done the Zen garden to death. I wanted to do something different.

[Takashi] Murakami, do you think he is spiritual? He is more like de-spiritualized. De-spiritualized might be the most contemporary aspect of the human mind.

Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions.

Life is one passage and then you keep moving into another state. It's like you might be reborn, but the process of being born you won't remember - the same way that the dying process is a slow movement from consciousness to unconsciousness.

Waterlilies always come in Buddhist sculpture. The Buddhas all stand on lotus pedestals, because the lotus is grown from the mud. The mud represents the stained world, a dirty world, but growing from the dirt is such a beautiful, pure thing. This is the way the spirit should be.