japan

Are we not clouded by our own self-interest, veiled by our misunderstandings, corrupted by the misinformation feeding the 'motherboard'_.our brain?

The games we have become familiar, and striven to compete. Yet the subtlety of gaining position is harder to achieve. We can never fully embrace that moment of success...from the outset it is a male-dominated leaning we sadly fail to address. No matter how we try, we cannot assimilate. On principle we are not one of them.

Immobilized in marriage, since long ago, she was taken as rightful property under wedlock. As a side note, I am urged to comment, the curious nature of these terms property and wed-lock; as if doomed to be firmly kept under latch and key, a padlocked yard? Pastures lain fallow occasionally?

But do you imagine there__ a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a __ad person'? You__l never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people are good, or at least they__e normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch. That__ why you have to be careful.

But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps__ut this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision.

When I was a student, there wasn't a single thing we did that was unrelated to others. It was all for the Emperor, or parents, or the country, or society__verything was other-centered, which means that all educated men were hypocrites. When society changed, this hypocrisy ceased to work, and as a result, self-centeredness was gradually imported into thought and action, and egoism became enormously over-developed. Instead of the old hypocrites, now all we've got are out-and-out rogues. Do you see what I mean by that?

The call for political freedom took place long ago. The call for freedom of speech is also a thing of the past. Freedom is not a word to be used exclusively for phenomena such as this which are so easily given outward manifestation. I believe that we young men of the new age have encountered the moment in time when we must call for that great freedom, the freedom of the mind.

A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him; the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Etsuko however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.

[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.

[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.

From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.

It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a rigidly predetermined notion of morality. Accordingly, he found the ethical education conducted by lecture in Japanese schools utterly meaningless. In the schools, students were either instructed in the old morality or crammed with a morality suited to the average European. For an unfortunate people beset by the fierce appetites of life, this amounted to nothing more than vain, empty talk. When the recipients of this education saw society before their eyes, they would recall those lectures and burst out laughing. Or else they would feel that they had been made fools of. In Daisuke's case it was not just school; he had received the most rigorous and least functional education from his father. Thanks to this, he had at one time experienced acute anguish stemming from contradictions. Daisuke even felt bitter over it.

Why has pachinko swept Japan? It can hardly be the excitement of gambling, since the risks and rewards are so small. During the hours spent in front of a pachinko machine, there is an almost total lack of stimulation other than the occasional rush of ball bearings. There is no thought, no movement; you have no control over the flow of balls, apart from holding a little lever which shoots them up to the top of the machine; you sit there enveloped in a cloud of heavy cigarette smoke, semi-dazed by the racket of millions of ball bearings falling through machines around you. Pachinko verges on sensory deprivation. It is the ultimate mental numbing, the final victory of the educational system." - Lost Japan, Eng. vers., 1996

A lot of my nonfiction is very strong environmental stories - I was the first guy to write about the dolphin killings in Japan.

Many Buddhist temple priests regard their parishioners as possessions and fear their departure as a diminishing of assets.

I served at the Pentagon and at Fort Leavenworth - my job was video cameraman, and that allowed me to travel to places like Korea, Japan, Alaska, Germany and the Netherlands.

What each of us believes in is up to us, but life is impossible without believing in something.

In Japan, usually, once you become prime minister, you do not have a second chance.