Japanese Culture Quotes

This was her heritage. Her people. So why did she feel so small and weak? So far removed from it? ~ Linda Gerber

What alternative is there to the media's "Us" versus "Them"? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this "righteous" position of "ours" all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the "dirty" distortions in "their" thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we'll remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy. ~ Haruki Murakami

He was righteous. He had a sense of duty, of what was right and wrong in the world, and I don't mean that in some evangelical sense of the word. And I don't mean that his world was just black and white. He just had a code, you know? He used to talk about that, about how few people had CODES anymore. It was his thing. He was always reading books about the samurai, about Japanese culture. ~ Nickolas Butler

Japan has a fundamental problem with information itself: it's often lacking, and when it does exist, is fuzzy at its best, bogus at its worst. In this respect, Japan's traditional culture stands squarely at odds with modernity - and the problem will persist. The issue of hidden or falsified information strikes at such deeply rooted social attitudes that the nation may never entirely come to grips with it. Because of this, one may confidently predict that in the coming decades Japan will continue to have trouble digesting new ideas from abroad - and will find it more and more difficult to manage its own increasingly baroque and byzantine internal systems. ~ Alex Kerr

Arosteguy poured more sake for both of them. "I love warm sake. How brilliant to create a drink at body temperature." He shook his head. "The Japanese. Feared by the West for so long, and now fading into their beloved sunrise. Or sunset. First militarily, then economically, and now, only gastronomically. And I need to become Japanese at a time when everyone wants to become Chinese. The Chinese call the Japanese 'the little people,' I've been told. That could have to do with the miniaturization of island species. I must do a study. ~ David Cronenberg

The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man's desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written with a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such a desire. ~ Yukio Mishima

I think that the Japanese culture is one of the very few cultures left that is its own entity. They're just so traditional and so specific in their ways. It's kind of untouched, it's not Americanized. ~ Toni Collette

I do wish men, when they're taking their leave from a lady at dawn, wouldn't insist on adjusting their clothes to a nicety, or fussily tying their lacquered cap securely into place. After all, who would laugh at a man or criticize him if they happened to catch sight of him on his way home from an assignation in fearful disarray, with his cloak or hunting costume all awry? ~ Sei Shonagon

When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan. ~ Tadao Ando

The days became for Christina endless preparation. Ceaseless winds tore through her massing battle ranks, the grey cold sun above marking the timeless date. With skies of blue and cloud overhead, driving, uncompromising time stood still, lingering, as if giving Christina precious eons to perfect her shaving straight razor cuts of mind and sword. She worked alone now, forging the essence of herself in the policies and ways of hammer and anvil, pounding away with the classic, living Japanese blade. Her deft hands spun dervishly, wroughting out the iron of her will, fashioning a blade-mind remade unto her. --Brickley, The Lady and the Samurai ~ Douglas Laurent

Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1968, committed suicide in 1971. Two years earlier, in 1969, another great Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, ended his life in the same way. Since 1895 ,thirteen Japanese novelists and writers have committed suicide, including the author of the Rashomon, Ryunosuko Akutagawa, in 1927. That "continuous tragedy" of Japanese culture during 70 years coincides with the penetration of Western civilization and materialistic ideas into the traditional culture of Japan. Whatever it be, for the poets and the writers of tragedies, civilization will always have an inhuman face and be a threat to humanity. A year before his death, Kawabata wrote "men are separated from each other by a concrete wall that obstructs any circulation of love. Nature is smothered in the name of progress." In the novel The Snow Country, published in 1937 , Kawabata places man's loneliness and alienation in the modern world at the very focus of his reflections. ~ Alija Izetbegovic

Not only does Japan have an economic need and the technological know-how for robots, but it also has a cultural predisposition. The ancient Shinto religion, practiced by 80 percent of Japanese, includes a belief in animism, which holds that both objects and human beings have spirits. As a result, Japanese culture tends to be more accepting of robot companions as actual companions than is Western culture, which views robots as soulless machines. In a culture where the inanimate can be considered to be just as alive as the animate, robots ~ Alec J. Ross

Since the 1970s, Japanese quality has become a byword, and many a book and article has been penned on the subject of Kaizen, 'improvement,' a form of corporate culture in which employers encourage their workers to submit ideas that will polish and improve efficiency. The writers on Kaizen, however, overlooked one weakness in this approach, which seemed minor at the time but has seriously impacted Japan's technology. Kaizen's emphasis is entirely on positive recommendations; there is no mechanism to deal with negative criticism, no way to disclose faults or mistakes - and this leads to a fundamental problem of information. People keep silent about embarrassing errors, with the result that problems are never solved. ~ Alex Kerr

Mostly, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents. Every sing oh righ? Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out. Can't you put on a little lipstick? They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town. We live like beggars. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor's birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us
whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp. ~ Julie Otsuka

As well as Japanese animation, technology has a huge influence on Japanese society, and also Japanese novels. It's because before, people tended to think that ideology or religion were the things that actually changed people, but it's been proven that that's not the case. Technology has been proven to be the thing that's actually changing people. So in that sense, it's become a theme in Japanese culture. ~ Mamoru Oshii

There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They're like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages. ~ Ann Nocenti

At the moment of victory, tighten the straps of your helmet. ~ Tokugawa Ieyasu

In Japanese culture it is said that if a vase is accidently broken and then glued back together, it becomes even more beautiful... regardless of its defects. It can be the same with people. ~ Jose N Harris

The highest goal is not distinctions, but synthesis and harmony. ~ Alan Macfarlane

The significance of the cherry blossom tree in Japanese culture goes back hundreds of years. In their country, the cherry blossom represents the fragility and the beauty of life. It's a reminder that life is almost overwhelmingly beautiful but that it is also tragically short. ~ Homaro Cantu

The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling. ~ Jack Gilbert

Whereas, in the west, individuality and drive are considered positive qualities, they are not seen the same way, in Japan. In that country, if you are too much of a rugged individualist, it might actually indicate that you are a weak,
unreliable character and that you are selfish, in a childish, willful kind of way. ~ Alexei Maxim Russell

Japan, not only a mega-busy city that thrives on electronics and efficiency, actually has an almost sacred appreciation of nature. One must travel outside of Tokyo to truly experience the 'old Japan' and more importantly feel these aspects of Japanese culture. ~ Apolo Ohno

There is no geometry here; or rather there is a secret, infinitely non-Eucledian and subtle geometry, a secret harmony that the mind seizes before the intelligence. ~ Alan Macfarlane

I don't speak Japanese, I don't know anything about Japanese business or Japanese culture. Apart from sushi. But I can't exactly go up to him and say "Sushi!" out of the blue. It would be like going up to a top American businessman and saying, "T-bone steak! ~ Sophie Kinsella

I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points. ~ Richard Flanagan

Bushido refers not only to martial rectitude but personal rectitude. We understand that in serving each other we serve our own interests.
In serving our world, our world serves us. Allowing us to live in harmony with it. ~ Rick Remender

It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten. It is a great intellectual challenge and a gorgeous sensual experience. ~ Alain Ducasse

Playing Japanese characters and being in environments that are Japanese, like a character's apartment or whatever, if you have directors or art directors who just don't know what' s what with Japanese culture, then pretty soon something's just passed through. I've been through many times where I've pointed out the incorrectness of so much of what's been done to a set. ~ Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

This reticence has little to do with trying to protect oneself and everything to do with trying to protect others from one's problems, which shouldn't be theirs; it's one reason Japan is so confounding to foreigners, as its people faultlessly sparkle and attend to one another in in public, while often seeming passive and unconvinced of their ability to do anything decisive at home. ~ Pico Iyer

In japanese culture, there's a belief that only imperfect objects, like a cracked teacup, can truly be beautiful. This is called wabi sabi.

Try to let go of the quest for perfection, and instead accept the beauty that lies in all of life's imperfections. The result will be extra energy, less stress and a longer life. ~ Blinkist

The biggest determinant in our lives is culture, where we are born, what the environment looks like. But the second biggest determinant is probably governance, good governance or a certain kind of governance makes a huge difference in our lives. ~ Nicolas Berggruen

In this sense, Byzantine culture embodies the French historian Fernand Braudel's notion of the longue durée, the long term: that which survives the vicissitudes of changing governments, newfangled fashions or technological improvements, an ongoing inheritance that can both imprison and inspire. ~ Judith Herrin

You can buy history, but you can't buy a culture. ~ Nathan Mirts

Since the mirror of gentrification is representation in popular culture, increasingly only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world. If all art, politics, entertainment, relationships, and conversations must maintain that what is constructed and imposed by force is actually natural and neutral, then the gentrified mind is a very fragile parasite. ~ Sarah Schulman

I don't belong to the masses, I've been against the masses all my life, and I'm not in favour of dogs. ~ Thomas Bernhard

I think British journalists do well in America because the newspaper culture there is so strong - telling stories and presenting them readably is in their DNA. British newspapers get a terrible rap, but they are brilliant in their presentation, most of them, so full of vitality and literary wit. ~ Tina Brown

Rape culture is a concept of unknown origin and of uncertain definition; yet it has made its way into everyday vocabulary and is assumed to be commonly understood. The award-winning documentary film Rape Culture made by Margaret Lazarus in 1975 takes credit for first defining the concept ~ Joyce E. Williams

Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies. ~ Terence McKenna

Anything that just adds information you can't use is plain dangerous. Anyway, there's too much of everything of this kind, that's come home to me, too much history and culture to keep track of, too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence, too many guys who tell you to be as they are, and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls torrent. Which who is supposed to interpret? Me? I haven't got that much head to master it all. I get carried away. It doesn't give my feelings enough of a chance if I have to store up and become like an encyclopedia. Why, just as a question of time spent in getting prepared for life, look! a man could spent forty, fifty, sixty years like that inside the walls of his own being. And all high conversation would take place within those walls. And all achievement would stay within those walls. And all glamour too. And even hate, monstrousness, enviousness, murder, would be inside them. This would be only a terrible, hideous dream about existing. It's better to dig ditches and hit other guys with your shovel than die in the walls. ~ Saul Bellow

I love pop culture. I love to be inside of it, and step outside and look back in. ~ Nick Rhodes

I believe that Ryan Murphy is a genius. His instincts remind me of Andy Warhol. I recently went to the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, and you can see a lot of echoes of Andy in Ryan's work. Like Andy, Ryan's finger is so on the pulse of culture that he's ahead of culture. Their aesthetic and their vision of the world are very similar. ~ Dylan McDermott

I'm very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can't think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not. ~ Pico Iyer

These were early days for me in the American culture, and so I wasn't aware that when people are showing you guns, they're not threatening you, it's like they're showing you their art collection. For me, at that point, what he was presenting to me was very challenging. ~ John Lydon

When I was a stripper I realized that men and women are equally fucked over about sex but in such different areas, we're blind to the other's pain. So for certain kinds of guys, women are heartless bitches and cock teases and will bleed you dry before giving you a kiss. And for some women, men are asshole jerks who only want one thing. They'll love you and leave you. I don't see it that way. It's the culture keeping them equally ignorant and feeding them nonsense. And then saying, go of and get married! ~ Nina Hartley

Shigureni is a variety of stewed meat where ginger has been added to the traditional soy sauce-and-sugar simmering sauce.
Thick, sweet and accented with ginger's uniquely spicy tang, there are layers of flavor to please the tongue!
Light yet thick, tangy yet sweet... all the various flavors patter across the tongue like a short afternoon drizzle- thus its name, shigure, which means "fall shower."
"It's a dish renowned for its exceptionally deep and compelling flavors."
"Ooh, you just know it's gonna be good. That's Takumi-chi for ya! He's a master of both Italian and Japanese cooking!" ~ Yuto Tsukuda

The contemporary Japanese directors who are well-known in the West - say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase - are mostly unknown to Japanese, particularly of the younger generation. ~ Hirokazu Koreeda

Courage is like a strain of yoghurt culture, if you have some you can have some more. ~ Ruth Gordon

Hip-hop culture is probably one of the most powerful things to come out of America in a long time - everything from the music to the art to the dance to the language. ~ Will.i.am

Be culturally literate, because if you don't have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you're not going to express anything to anybody else. ~ Paula Scher

Life now insists that we encounter groundlessness. Systems and ideas that seemed reliable and solid dissolve at an increasing rate. People who asked for our trust betray or abandon us. Strategies that worked suddenly don't. Groundlessness is a frightening place, at least at first, but as the old culture turns to mush, we would feel stronger if we stopped searching for ground, if we sought only to locate ourselves in the present and do our work from here. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

Discipleship for resident aliens, or exiles, is different from discipleship in a culture in which the Christian faith is assumed and the goal is to draw people back into something the culture already tells them they should do. ~ Timothy Keller

In America, people with pre-existing mental health issues have access to firearms but not healthcare. Thanks, Republicans! ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Irene nodded. She couldn't say it but she knew she was destroying a world. A little culture. It was the known and safe way of behaving in the family. All the rituals, wrong or sick, it didn't matter, good or bad, would be useless. All the strategies. They knew the familiar treacheries, but now they would be open to new dangers. ~ Louise Erdrich

If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent. ~ Susan Cain

Theoretically, let's stipulate, for argument's sake, that there are a lot of powerful people at a university like this who believe things that aren't, strictly speaking, true."

Leftists, you mean."

Let's just call them people. Powerful people."

All right."

These powerful people believe things like: One culture is as good as another. Or, there's no such thing as good and evil. Therefore, if America is at odds or at war with someone, it must be America's fault. You only have to think about those statements for two minutes to see that they can't possibly be true. But these people think they should be true and they think they'll seem to be true if no one is allowed to say they're not true. So they attack anyone who says that they're not true. They call him names. Racist, sexist, phobic, offensive, whatever. They demand apologies from him. They make his life a misery, so no one wants to speak up."

So it's like the emperor's new clothes."

Right. Except instead of clothes, it's all the emperor's lies. And in an Empire of Lies, only a crazy man would speak the truth. ~ Andrew Klavan

I thought about how easily we are all brainwashed by our society and culture to stop thinking and just assume by default that more money equals more success and more happiness, when ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life. ~ Tony Hsieh

To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we're not especially bothered by what happens once we're dead. As we age - oh, so reluctantly! - we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

If that package sounds like one big moral step backward, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from sixties catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upsides. There has to be some value in living for today, since at any given time today is all you've got. We justly cherish characters c ~ Lionel Shriver

The present-day Prussian is one of the most dangerous enemies of culture ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The "culture of honor" hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It's just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what makes music or culture or taste go in certain directions. Who knows what the forces are behind it. ~ Beck

There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us. ~ Werner Herzog

I think I was obsessed with the culture of riding. I got sick of having to date guys who rode motorcycles for me to be on them. ~ Katee Sackhoff