japan

Tokyo is a very safe city. At night it becomes quiet the way New York never does.

In Japan, so many emoticons have been created that it__ reasonable to assume Japanese appreciate their convenience more than anyone else.

At the root of Japanese manufacturing lies a feminine delicacy and shyness as well as a childlike curiosity and fantasy-filled worldview.

Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular.

There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel)

Japan never considers time together as time wasted. Rather, it is time invested.

In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.How very clean.Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.

Gift giving is part of the culture no matter where you are and no matter how long you stay.

Japanese universities have a chair system that is a fixed hierarchy. This has its merits when trying to work as a laboratory on one theme. But if you want to do original work you must start young, and young people are limited by the chair system. Even if students cannot become assistant professors at an early age they should be encouraged to do original work....Industry is more likely to put its research effort into its daily business. It is very difficult for it to become involved in pure chemistry. There is a need to encourage long-range research, even if we don't know its goal and if its application is unknown.

That Seigo could go into geisha houses, accept luncheon invitations, drop in at the Club, see people off at Shimabashi, meet them at Yokohama, run out to Oiso to humor the elders__hat he could put in his appearance at large gatherings from morning to evening without seeming either triumphant or dejected__his must be because he was thoroughly accustomed to this kind of life, thought Daisuke; it was probably like the jellyfish's floating in the sea and not finding it salty.

The Japanese have two words: "uchi" meaning inside and "soto" meaning outside. Uchi refers to their close friends, the people in their inner circle. Soto refers to anyone who is outside that circle. And how they relate and communicate to the two are drastically different. To the soto, they are still polite and they might be outgoing, on the surface, but they will keep them far away, until they are considered considerate and trustworthy enough to slip their way into the uchi category. Once you are uchi, the Japanese version of friendship is entire universes beyond the average American friendship! Uchi friends are for life. Uchi friends represent a sacred duty. A Japanese friend, who has become an uchi friend, is the one who will come to your aid, in your time of need, when all your western "friends" have turned their back and walked away.

In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.

Sometimes, when we are sad, we have to do the opposite of sad. Sometimes we have to sing.

Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan... Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself _ not to Japan, not to anything. You may think that what you're doing is for the sake of the nation, but let something take possession of you like that, and all you do is bring it down.

In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust.

Purification in Shinto lifts the burden from the shoulders of the individual and washes it away.

In our modern world, we look unkindly on mistakes and imperfection. But this is far from the samurai ideal. Mistakes are part of the learning process and if you haven't made them then you are, indeed, dangerous because it means you have never learned anything. Mistakes, to a samurai, are the proof of your learning.

The face of self-pity was universally understood.