I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'.
On my first days here I did not start work immediately but, as planned, I took it easy for a few days - flicked through books, studied Japanese art a little.
There was something strangely compelling about a Japanese guy with lamb-chop sideburns and a voice so shrill you could be forgiven for thinking his testicles were wired to the national grid.
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...
The big fun in 'Battleship' is that there are no current battleships in the Navy today. The battleships are about 1,000 feet long and they have huge guns. They were what you saw in WWII. The last battleship that was used was the Missouri, which is wh...
Being lampooned on 'South Park' is hardly something to complain about. They brought the issue of the dolphin and whale slaughter by the Japanese to a very large audience. I could not really care less how I was portrayed.
Way back in October 2007, I had urged thousands of Australians to vote for Kevin Rudd and Peter Garrett's Labor Party. Why? Because they promised to get tough on illegal Japanese whaling.
During the 1980s, when Japan's economy was roaring and people were writing books with titles like 'Japan is Number One,' most Japanese college students didn't make the effort to become fluent in English.
There are some ghost stories in Japan where - when you are sitting in the bathroom in the traditional style of the Japanese toilet - a hand is actually starting to grab you from beneath. It's a very scary story.
Often motivated by a desire to maintain the existing status quo, sloth almost cost the U.S. its auto industry, as it refused for decades to build fuel-efficient cars to compete with Japanese, Korean and European imports.
The direct investment of Japanese businesses to East Asian economies accelerates the reallocation of their production bases. Consequently, between Japan and the other East Asian countries, both exports and imports are growing substantially.
There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time's passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it.
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.
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 Japanes...
Japan is the most intoxicating place for me. In Kyoto, there's an inn called the Tawaraya which is quite extraordinary. The Japanese culture fascinates me: the food, the dress, the manners and the traditions. It's the travel experience that has moved...
My first trip to Japan, in 1998, began with an enormous crowd of Japanese paparazzi and television crews, all waiting for me to clear customs in Tokyo (a first-time experience for this wine critic). Over the next five days, the attention never waned.
When I venture out to eat, I like to go to places with food that I don't know how to make. So my favorites are Japanese and Indian. Indian food has so much layering of flavor, and the dishes go together so harmoniously.
I wish that they had the freedoms like the Japanese and the Koreans and the Mexicans and everybody else that has that freedom to come over here and play the game, because I know Cuba has a very strong baseball history.
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, Dan...
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.
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.
