Japanese society doesn't have a god - no absolute presence.
Lets see, I remember the first time I went to Japan, I loved that because I was taller than everyone! I'm only 5'7' but in Japan that's good!
Koreans are worried about the Japanese right-wing people, who tend to be against foreigners. But the Koreans in Japan aren't even foreigners. They are essentially culturally Japanese. If a family has lived in Japan for three generations, it's absurd to see them as foreigners.
I like the freedom America has. In Japan people tend to think too much about others' opinions and how to be like everybody else but to Americans it seems more important to be who you are and find your own way.
Japanese people tend to be much better adjusted to the notion of work, any kind of work, as honorable.
The Japanese have become so smitten with the Western condiment - its texture as silky as a kimono, its tang as understated as the tang of Zen - that today they have a word for mayonnaise junkie: mayora.
There's an interesting book called The Fugu Plan, written by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, which describes the circumstances when European Jews came to Japan, a semi-feudal society.
When I was in Japan, everyone wanted to work for Pierre Gagnaire, and they wouldn't miss a beat.
My life was very Japanese.
There are still people in Japan who think money is something evil.
As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Japanese people have a funny habit of abbreviating names.
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 from the outside.
I have read that, on the average, the Japanese are getting taller, but at the moment they seem to be about the same height as American junior-high-school students, only with fewer guns.
I'm not the ambassador of Japan or Japanese culture.
It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.
I lived among the Japanese, and saw their mode of living, in regions unaffected by European contact.
Today, Japan is one of the few countries in the world where one hears laughter everywhere.
When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas.
I grew up in Japan. It's my first memories of life are Japan.
Living in Europe, I was surprised to find out just how little everyone knows about Japan.
They have some pretty tough gun laws in Japan, as they do in any other civilized country in the world, and they're not killing each other off with firearms. You have very violent films in Europe, yet it's not causing the mayhem we see in our streets routinely here.
I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer.
Tokyo is like the New York of Asia. Although the people there are all basically from Japan, they celebrate what they like about various cultures.
Whatever doubts or vexations one has in Japan, it is only necessary to ask one's self: "Well, who are the best people to live with?
