My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father's culturally German, but his father was Japanese. I was raised in New York and spent two years in Rio. My parents met at the University of Southern Mississippi, and they had me there,...
I often look ridiculous in Japan. There's really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more h...
Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that's when she turns into a 'Christmas Cake'. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are pu...
The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the 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 strugglin...
We hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social mo...
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a met...
The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima—the “eternal present.
Just as writing can become calligraphy when it’s creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement—the art of living.
I do want to learn the way to do it over here. I'm not really looking to just go about my way and do it in the Japanese way that I've been doing. Basically, I'll try to get some advice, learn the way it's done here and go about it.
To serve as prime minister while being too mindful of the approval rating is like serving as a prime minister on a roller coaster. What is important, I believe, is that I really act on promises that I make and leave results. Leave a track record and ...
The typical big Japanese company has somewhere between a third and 40 percent of its revenues coming from developing countries, and about a third of Japan's exports are also to the emerging countries, so in a strange way, Japan, which has very little...
Chaudhary Sumer Singh: Be it a Pakistani, a Chinese or a Japanese, what does it matter? I don't see all this, all I see is that if the heart is pure, and if the right woman is sitting behind you with her hand on your shoulder, she will never let you ...
Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society f...
[last lines] Japanese newscaster: Susan Jones, who was wounded in a terrorist attack in Morocco, was discharged from a Casablanca hospital this morning, local time. The American people finally have a happy ending, after five days of frantic phone cal...
The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of...
The most beautiful thing that I learned, I learned from my kids. They were eight and ten - and they were playing with Moroccan kids in these humble villages, and they were playing with the Japanese kids... because they haven't built those walls that ...
At times, I do Tabata, a high-intensity Japanese training regimen, in which I must do 20 seconds of a specific body part with 10 seconds of rest. This must be done eight times within four minutes. Your heart rate shoots through the roof, but you burn...
I have always appreciated designers who dare to reinterpret fabrics and proportions, so I follow the Japanese and Belgian designers. The pieces are so animated. When they lie still, they are one thing, but once you stand them up or wear them, they be...
Jobs are a part of life. Maybe you've heard of the concept. It's called work? See, what happens is that you suffer through doing annoying and humiliating things until you get paid not enough money. Like those Japanese game shows, only without all the...
I like what I see now in China, but I think the Japanese are a step ahead into craziness and weirdness. I go to galleries there that are the size of a New York elevator, and every time I'm surprised by the amazing things I find. I really hope I'll be...
Gracie: You have an unusual house. Have you lived here long? Bobby Tom: A couple of years. I don't much like it myself, but the architect is real proud of it. She calls it urban Stone Age with a Japanese Tahitian influence. I sort of just call it ugl...
