Ukemi In Japanese Quotes

However, whatever frightening mask it might assume, the national spirit in its original state was of pristine whiteness. Traveling through a country like Thailand, Honda realized more clearly than ever the simplicity and purity of things Japanese, like transparent stream water
through which one could glimpse pebbles below, or the probity of Shinto rites. Honda's life was not imbued with such spirit. Like the majority of Japanese he ignored it, behaving as though it did not exist and surviving by
escaping from it. All his life he had dodged things fundamental and artless: white silk, clear cold water, the zigzag white paper of the exorciser's staff fluttering in the breeze, the sacred precinct marked by a torii, the gods'
dwelling in the sea, the mountains, the vast ocean, the Japanese sword with its glistening blade so pure and sharp. Not only Honda, but the vast majority of Westernized Japanese, could no longer stand such intensely native elements. ~ Yukio Mishima

I could soon see outlines of people in the water in the distance, all of them covered in oil. I had no way to know who they were, whether Japanese or POWs. It was easy to mistake a Japanese for one of my own. I made up my mind that if it came down to me or a Japanese, he would be going to meet his ancestors. ~ Alistair Urquhart

Chia decided to change the subject. "What's your brother like? How old is he?" "Masahiko is seventeen," Mitsuko said. "He is a 'pathological - techno - fetishist - with - social - deficit," ' this last all strung together like one word, indicating a concept that taxed the lexicon of the ear-clips. Chia wondered briefly if it would be worth running it through her Sandbenders, whose translation functions updated automatically whenever she ported. "A what?" "Otaku," Mitsuko said carefully in Japanese. ~ William Gibson

With a cold"
she spoke evenly, lowering her eyes a little
"now is the hardest time. Maybe even harder than dying. But this is probably as bad as it can get. You might come to fear the next time you get a cold; it will be as bad as this, but if you just hold steady, it won't be. For the rest of your life. That's how it works. You could take the negative view and live in fear: Will it happen again? But it won't hurt so much if you just accept it as a part of life." With that she looked up at me, smiling. ~ Banana Yoshimoto

I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese. ~ Paul Auster

In 1986, when I was 21, I lived in Tokyo for four months, boarding with a Japanese family and working for an American company. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

What the art historians had forgotten is that in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Indian art, they never painted shadows. Why did they paint shadows in European art? Shadows are because of optics. Optics need shadows and strong light. Strong light makes the deepest shadows. It took me a few years to realize fully that the art historians didn't grasp that. There are a lot of interesting new things, ideas, pictures. ~ David Hockney

The US economy, because it's so energy wasteful, is much less efficient than either the European or Japanese economies. It takes us twice as much energy to produce a unit of GDP as it does in Europe and Japan. So, we're fundamentally less efficient and therefore less competitive, and the sooner we being to tighten up, the better it will be for our economy and society. ~ Hazel Henderson

I love the Japanese director Shohei Imamura. His masterpiece in 1979 called, the English title was 'Vengeance is Mine.' ~ Bong Joon-ho

Japanese gardeners, over many centuries, have learned to do things to trees, to clip their roots or trim their branches, to limit their supply of water, air, or sun, so that they live, and for a long time, but only in tiny, shrunken, twisted shapes. Such trees may please us, or they may not. But what could they tell us about the nature of trees? If a tree can be deformed and shrunk, is this, then, its nature? The nature of these trees, given enough of the sun, air, water, soil, and food they need, is to grow like trees, tall and straight. People can be more easily deformed, and worse deformed, even than trees - and more than trees, they feel it, it hurts. But ~ John Holt

From outside the shelter came children's voices. The shrill squeals brought the excitement of their unseen game into the opaque quiet of Setsuko's world and made her smile. "No war can go on forever. And human beings are the toughest creatures on earth, you know. There's no sense in being in a hurry to die. You MUST LIVE, whatever happens." Shoichi Wakui had squeezed her hand and told her this with an almost violent urgency, though his grasp was weak and his voice halting. Were those the Sugiwaras' children she could hear? The barber had had the presence of mind to rescue his kit when he fled through the flames of his burning shop, and now he was doing a brisk trade, seating his customers on cushions atop piled stones from the foundations. To house his family he'd put a lean-to against the railway embankment, barely enough to keep out the weather, but at least the children were no longer starving. Even in defeat the locally garrisoned soldiers all had some supplies of food, and while waiting to board trains for their hometowns from Yokohama Station they'd sit on the stone seat of the Sugawara Barbershop and have a good shave, leaving the children something to eat as payment.
Setsuko no longer felt the rage that had overwhelmed her at the disbanding ceremony. If they had fought on home ground, one hundred million Japanese sworn to die before they would surrender, those children would have had to die too. Those young lives and spirits would have been extinguished in terror ~ Shizuko Gō

The soul, you see, is a shy and retiring thing. It lurks in dark places and dislikes sunlight. And so, if you do not keep the skylight open at all times, the soul will rot. It easily decays, like a fresh sea urchin. ~ Yukio Mishima

The small Japanese immortal sat cross-legged, his two swords resting flat on the ground before him. He folded his hands in his lap, closed his eyes and breathing through his nose, forcing the chill night air deep into his chest. He held it for a count of five, then shaped his lips into an O and blew it out again, puncturing a tiny hole in the swirling fog before his face.
Even though he would never admit it to anyone, Niten loved this moment. He had no affection for what was to come, but this brief time, when all preparations for battle were made and there was nothing left to do but wait, when the world felt still, as if it was holding its breath, was special. This moment, when he was facing death, was when he felt completely, fully alive.
He'd still been called Miyamoto Musashi and had been a teenager when he'd first discovered the genuine beauty of the quiet moment before a fight. Every breath suddenly tasted like the finest food, every sound was distinct and divine, and even on the foulest battlefields, his eyes would be drawn to something simple and elegant: a flower, the shape of a branch, the curl of a cloud.
A hundred years ago, Aoife had given him a book as a birthday present. He hadn't had the heart to tell her that she'd missed his birthday by a month, but he had treasured the book, the first edition of The Professor by Charlotte Bronte. It included a line he had never forgotten: In the midst of life we are in death. Years later, he'd heard Ghandi tak ~ Michael Scott

Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that there's a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life. ~ Suzanne Vega

There are a number of good books that draw upon fox legends -- foremost among them, Kij Johnson's exquisite novel The Fox Woman. I also recommend Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters (with the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano); Larissa Lai's unusual novel, When Fox Is a Thousand; Helen Oyeyemi's recent novel, Mr. Fox; and Ellen Steiber's gorgeous urban fantasy novel, A Rumor of Gems, as well as her heart-breaking novella "The Fox Wife" (published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears). For younger readers, try the "Legend of Little Fur" series by Isobelle Carmody. You can also support a fine mythic writer by subscribing to Sylvia Linsteadt's The Gray Fox Epistles: Wild Tales By Mail.

For the fox in myth, legend, and lore, try: Fox by Martin Wallen; Reynard the Fox, edited by Kenneth Varty; Kitsune: Japan's Fox of Mystery, Romance, and Humour by Kiyoshi Nozaki;Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative by Raina Huntington; The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling by Leo Tak-hung Chan; and The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship, by Karen Smythers. ~ Terri Windling

A Japanese can live on a teaspoonful of rice a day. We were the best breed of worker they had ever hired in their lives. ~ Julie Otsuka

When a Japanese woman disrupts the powerful sequence of natural movement with her jerky little steps, we ought to experience the disquiet that troubles our soul whenever nature is violated in this way, but in fact we are filled with a unfamiliar blissfulness, as if disruption could lead to a sort of ecstasy, and a grain of sand to beauty. What we discover in this affront to the sacred rhythm of life, this defiant movement of little feet, this excellence born of constraint, is a paradigm of Art. ~ Muriel Barbery

But nobody lives in a universal thing called culture. They live only in specific cultures, each of which differ from one another. Plays written and produced in Germany are three times as likely to have tragic or unhappy endings than plays written and produced in the United States. Half of all people in India and Pakistan say they would marry without love, but only 2 percent of people in Japan would do so. Nearly a quarter of Americans say they are often afraid of saying the wrong things in social situations, whereas 65 percent of all Japanese say they are often afraid. In their book Drunken Comportment, Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton found that in some cultures drunken men get into fights, but in some cultures they almost never do. In some cultures drunken men grow more amorous, but in some cultures they do not. ~ David Brooks

Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II. ~ Eisaku Sato

Another British study discovered that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game Pokemon than native species in the community where they lived: Pikachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff were names more familiar to them than otter, beetle, and oak tree. ~ Richard Louv

Why are things always happy in Japanese restaurants? Just once, maybe I'd like to try the Sashimi of Discontent, or the Heartbroken Hand Roll ~ Amy Vansant

Look closely at the Japanese; they draw admirably and yet in them you will see life outdoors and in the sun without shadows ... ~ Paul Gauguin

What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.

'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment. ~ Natasha Pulley

Not specifically. "Demons have been on Earth as long as we have. They're all over the world, in their different forms – Greek daemons, Persian daevas, Hindu asuras, Japanese oni. Most belief systems have some method of incorporating both their existence and the fight against them. Shadowhunters cleave to no single religion, and in turn all religions assist us in our battle. I could as easily have gone for help to a Jewish synagogue or a Shinto temple, or – Ah. Here it is. ~ Cassandra Clare

ONE OF THE STURDIEST PRECEPTS of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to this axiom. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World's Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia which is the usual hallmark of the aetataureate delusion. ~ Michael Chabon

The Japanese school year begins in spring ... so mothers can send off their children as cherry blossoms fall from the branches. ~ Cathy Davidson

It is difficult for my fellow countrymen who have never lived abroad to understand that until a foreign man is about sixty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he'd like to punch an American in the face. Even people like the Chinese, who mostly like us, think of us
at least partly
as loud, fat, poorly dressed, overprivileged, hectoring, naive, arrogant, self-righteous bullies with little knowledge and no interest in any culture other than our own. I once had a conversation with a Japanese journalist who said to me, "You don't seem like an American." When I asked him, slightly hurt, why he said that, he replied, "Because you listen. ~ Matthew Polly

The causes of the China Incident were the exclusion and insult of Japan throughout China, the exclusion of Japanese goods, the persecution of Japanese residents in China, and the illegal violation of Japanese rights. ~ Hideki Tojo

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

Japan's economy had remained strong. So called 'Dutch' learning- useful Western knowledge- was circulating in Japan well before Commodore Perry's arrival. A strong local tradition of banker-merchants and an efficient tax collection system meant that the Japanese economy was not crippled by foreign loans of the kind that banished Egypt, the first non-Western country to modernize, to the ranks of permanent losers in the international economy. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Dashi remains unfamiliar to most French and American cooks, who tend to reach for a bouillon cube to do many of the same things. But dashi is worth preparing and using the way the Japanese do: for poaching fish, as a soup base, and in simmered dishes. ~ Nobu Matsuhisa

Americans are Americans and everyone else is sorry. Half the time we don't even know what we're sorry about, it just squeaks out of our sorry gaps before we've even clues into the conversation. Well, I'm sorry YOU'RE all so sorry. You have to know when to be sorry. You can't really be sorry for something you don't want to remember, can you? Selective memory, isn't it? Let's be honest, hell, you can't even apologize for the shit you did yesterday never mind fifty years ago. Indian residential schools, Japanese internment camps, hell, and this is just in your neighborhood. But it's all right... everybody's sorry these days. The politicians are sorry, the cops are sorry, the priests are sorry, the logging companies are sorry, mining companies, electric companies, water companies, wife beaters, serial rapists, child molesters, mommy and daddy. Everybody's sorry. Everybody's sorry they got caught sticking it to someone else... that's what they are sorry about... getting caught. They could give a rat's ass about you, or me, or the people they are saying sorry to. Think about it... Don't be a sorry ass, be sorry before you have to say you are sorry. Be sorry for even thinking about, bringing about something sorry-filled. And the next time someone says, "There is one law for everyone." Say, "I'm sorry, you're an idiot." Just kidding, now that was harsh. ~ Marie Clements

Almost every woman had a primary role in the "female-dominated" family structure; only a small percentage of men had a primary role in the "male-dominated" governmental and religious structures. Many mothers were, in a sense, the chair of the board of a small company - their family. Even in Japan, women are in charge of the family finances - a fact that was revealed to the average American only after the Japanese stock market crashed in 1992 and thousands of women lost billions of dollars that their husbands never knew they had invested.23 Conversely, most men were on their company's assembly line - either its physical assembly line or its psychological assembly line. ~ Warren Farrell

With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology, rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese, Danish, and Germans. ~ Jay Inslee

For instance, Visser, the Dutchman, had sold German machine guns to the Chinese, spied for the Japanese and served a term of imprisonment for killing a coolie in Batavia. He was not an easy man to handle. ~ Eric Ambler

Beautiful and minimalist, the traditional Japanese art of ikebana - arranging bouquets of cut flowers and leaves using very few elements - ideally corresponded to a form of expression I could transpose in a perfume. The smell of a rose early in the morning, damp, sprinkled with dew, delicate and light. ~ Jean-Claude Ellena

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it's big and up close. Sometimes it's a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it's not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji. ~ Terry Pratchett

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

If there is anything that makes my blood boil it is to see our allies in Indochina and Java deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little people we promised to liberate. It is the most ignoble kind of betrayal. ~ Douglas MacArthur

Eli Willard just looked at her for a long moment, and then he announced, 'Lady of the Lake strikes iceberg in mid-Atlantic; 215 drown. New York City fire destroys 700 buildings. Japanese earthquake kills 12,000. Worldwide cholera epidemic kills millions. Wages rise, but prices rise faster. Financial crash occurs on Van Buren's 36th day in office. Nation begins first great depression. Bank failures and closings spread like plague. 200,000 are unemployed. Business bankrupt; only pawnbrokers prosper. Van Buren declares ten-hour days on all federal jobs. There. Does that make you feel any better? ~ Donald Harington

Alabama farmers want a chance to complete fairly in Japan, but they can't if the Japanese won't let us in. ~ Mike Rogers

At this place in time, neither of them were foreign to each other. They were just two humans alone in the middle of the sky. The differences between them now were immaterial, like the faint whisper of traffic far below. ~ Zita Steele

Of course, when it comes to Japanese role-playing games, in any role-playing game in Japan you're supposed to collect a huge number of items, and magic, and you've got to actually combine different items together to make something really different. ~ Shigeru Miyamoto

It was a revolution, but now it is an evolution. People know more ingredients, people know more techniques, and people look for more ingredients they've never looked for before. In the '80s, you couldn't find raw tuna in any restaurant that wasn't Japanese. Now, you can't find any restaurant without it or sashimi. ~ Wolfgang Puck

When our citizens are determined to openly wear pistols on their belts to go shopping at Walmart, that signifies to me a failure on the part of the macho ideal. Ostensibly, the handgun is displayed to let evildoers know, in no uncertain terms, that this is not a person with whom to trifle. It then follows that the wearing of the pistol presumes a situation in which the bearer will need to shoot someone, rendering the brandishing of the weapon a badge of fear, does it not? It occurs to me that if we keep on turning to such "masculine" methodology to solve our conflicts, the only inevitable ending is a bunch of somebody's family lying in a bloody schoolhouse, movie theater, or smoking Japanese city. I guess we just hope it's not our family? I don't like the odds. ~ Nick Offerman

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art ~ Oscar Wilde