Quotes About Japan

Japan is our rival, not our enemy. Japan is a competitor... Bashing a Toyota won't make a better car.

The reactors in Japan are stable in the same way that a ticking time bomb is also stable. It wouldn't take much to light the fuse - a 6.6 earthquake, like what happened today in Japan, a pipe break, an over-pressurized containment vessel - anything could set it off, in which case we would have another Chernobyl, three times the magnitude of a Chernobyl accident.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

I had been conscious a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [Secretary Of War Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.'

I will not offer my thoughts on what Japan could and should have done, this is none of my business, it is the business of the Japanese leadership. But we should understand how practicable all our agreements are as a whole given the allied obligations Japan has assumed, how much independence there is in making those decision, and what we can hope for, what we can ultimately arrive at.

I think actually what I'm going to do when I'm done and take my next vacation, is I'm going to go over and start unions in Japan. I'm going to unionize Japan. Because the way they work those crews is so criminal. There's no overtime, so they can just keep going.

The industry in Japan moving toward CGI is not as severe and extreme as in the U.S. The animation industry in the U.S. is firing 2D animators and closing those studios, but I think it's possibly because the national traits of the U.S. prefer super-realism. Since Japan is a country that prefers plane vision, I don't think we will leave 2D and substitute hand-drawing with CGI entirely.

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

The greatest problem all around the world today, whether in America, Japan, China, Russia, India or anywhere else in the world, is that people are not in peace. People want peace.

In How to Be an American Housewife Margaret Dilloway creates an irresistible heroine. Shoko is stubborn, contrary, proud, a wonderful housewife and full of deeply conflicted feelings. I wanted to shake her, even as I was cheering her on, and this cunningly structured novel allowed me to do both. It also took me on two intricate journeys, from post-war Japan and the shadow of Nagasaki to contemporary California, and from motherhood to daughterhood and back again. A profound and suspenseful debut.

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.

It is 60 years since the restoration of diplomatic relations, but relations between Japan and Russia have much deeper roots. In all, our diplomatic ties date back 150 years, more than 150 years now.

This is almost the most famous story The last samurai - Samurai story - in Japan.

I went to the Tokyo Film Festival in Japan because I love Japanese cinema.

Basically, people in other countries don't want to have to work quite as flat-out as they do in Japan.

The enemy is still proud and powerful. He is hard to get at. He still possesses enormous armies, vast resources, and invaluable strategic territories...No one can tell what new complications and perils might arise in four or five more years of war. And it is in the dragging-out of the war at enormous expense, until the democracies are tired or bored or split that the main hopes of Germany and Japan must reside.

I loved cowboy films and TV series, and I learned bits of English from them. My favorite was 'Laramie', with Robert Fuller and John Smith. I used to watch 'The Lone Ranger', which had been famous in Japan as well. I idolized these cowboys.

I never had any financial support or sponsors, and so I always had to, at every level, prove myself the hard way. I was five years in Japan before I got my debut at Le Mans. And I think this is a humble way to get through as a racing driver.

To make the quickest progress, you don't have to take huge leaps. You just have to take baby steps-and keep on taking them. In Japan, they call this approach kaizen, which literally translates as 'continual improvement.' Using kaizen, great and lasting success is achieved through small, consistent steps. It turns out that slow and steady is the best way to overcome your resistance to change.

Anyway, the US, as in most issues, is the best, has the best capability to lead, and really needs to lead. It doesn't [mean] that other countries won't pick different tacks and emphasize different things. In aggregate, they're almost half of the energy R&D. Europe, China, Japan - it's very important that they come along and contribute to these things.

Our agreements on creating the conditions for preparing a peace treaty [with Japan] should be rooted in this trust. This may be achieved, for example, by large-scale economic activities that will also cover the Kuril Islands. It may be achieved by solving purely humanitarian issues, for instance, unhindered visa-free travel by former residents of the Southern Kuril Islands to where they used to live: visiting cemeteries, native places and so on.

I promise to protect Japan's land and sea, and the lives of the Japanese people no matter what.

How can you have a world of today where India is not represented in the Security Council; Japan, the second contributor, is not there; the whole continent of Africa, soon to be 54 countries, don't have a single permanent seat; and Latin America is absent? It's not realistic.

I think recognition outside of Japan is amazing. I don't feel like that kind of thing would ever happen to me, as I'm not like those kinds of designers - I don't want to express myself in such a categorized way. I kind of want to be in the middle of the majority and the minority. I don't really want people to know what I am.

I was 12 or 13, and I had seen a demo about origami at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. My dad, my step-mom, and I were at the Japan pavilion of Epcot, and my dad was going to get me an origami book. They had these really sick origami books with an overleaf, but those packs can sometimes blow, because they give you, like, eight sheets.

I really am a recluse. I just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees. In America someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect. I guess I am somewhere in between. I enjoy reclusion: it clears my mind.

I said to myself, 'the champion of the whole world can whoop every man in Russia, every man in America, every man in China, every man in Japan, every man in Europe - every man in the whole world'.It sounds big, didn't it? So I kept working until I did it.

On the other hand, the vast majority of all westernized countries, including every single European country along with Israel and Japan, do not offer birthright citizenship.

One must learn, if one is to see the beauty in Japan, to like an extraordinarily restrained and delicate loveliness

Maybe it's the Calvinist guilt about capitalism or mercantilism. But, I like the idea of doing things that only exist for as long as they exist, which are not archives, which are not sold or prepared even. It's funny though, because a lot of my unreliable tours were inspired by the docents at the Japan Society, who are mostly these volunteers from the Upper East Side. They basically find positive messages in really nihilist, perverse videos. So they were my inspiration.

If America could get along with Russia - and by the way, China and Japan and everyone. If we could get along, it would be a positive thing, not a negative thing.

So you set out to travel to Rome... and end up in Istanbul. You set off for Japan... and you end up on a train across Siberia. The journey, not the destination, becomes a source of wonder.

Japan needs to cooperate with China economically. This is understood better by the business community than the government.

Therefore, I do not think we should go only 60 years back but should look deeper, centuries back. Maybe this will give us [Russia and Japan] an opportunity to look at the future from a more remote perspective.

They have some pretty tough gun laws in Japan, as they do in any other civilized country in the world, and they're not killing each other off with firearms. You have very violent films in Europe, yet it's not causing the mayhem we see in our streets routinely here.

In Japan we have the phrase, "Shoshin," which means "beginner's mind." Our "original mind" includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything. It is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

We Americans have to tell Japan in a very nice way, we have to tell Germany, all of these countries, South Korea, we have to say, you have to help us out.

The Imperial Household, as represented by the Emperor, has been praying for the welfare of the people while nurturing harmonious relationship with them. Based on the people's respect and adoration for the Emperor, the Japanese people have stayed united. That is the essence of Japan's national heritage, I believe.

The first country that I went to outside of America was Japan and I was completely shocked - especially since I was 16 and over there by myself. I was like: "I don't get it; there's nothing in English!"

I think that people here expect miracles. American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan - but they don't know what to copy!

I haven't changed. If it seems I'm becoming more mainstream, doesn't that mean instead that Japan is aligning itself with me? I haven't changed one bit.

One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.

Japan had a more radical experience of future shock than any other nation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. They were this feudal place, locked in the past, but then they bought the whole Industrial Revolution kit from England, blew their cultural brains out with it, became the first industrialized Asian nation, tried to take over their side of the world, got nuked by the United States for their trouble, and discovered Steve McQueen! Their take on iconic menswear emerges from that matrix.

I wanted out of the navy so bad in '45, I faked homo to get a discharge. It didn't matter that the Germans surrendered, I knew we were heading to Japan and I was done with that scene.

Between 1965 (the beginning of LBJ's "Great Society") and 1994, welfare spending has cost the taxpayers $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. The War on Poverty has cost us 70 % more than the total price tag for defeating both Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation. Many believe that Welfare has destroyed millions of families and cost a huge portion of our national wealth in the process.

Further, Japan is the second largest donor in Iraq after the United States, with over $5 billion dollars for humanitarian, infrastructure and reconstruction projects.

In space, you can't see the borders. It doesn't look like a map. We're all like kids fighting in a sandbox, on the political and human side of it. The International Space Station was built in orbit. Each piece hurtled into space at eight kilometres per second. From an engineering point of view, it's madness. It's also a feat of policy - Russia, the U.S., Germany and Japan working together. Do you realize what that means? These countries were sending nukes to each other a generation ago. Space does that. It gives us that amazing big picture.

The people in Japan love jazz music, man, and also in Europe, far more than they ever did here. And that always puzzled me until I went over there to really get into it for myself and find out what it is. It's their tradition and culture, man. We've gotten away from that in America, man. We live in a country of complete fantasy.