My life was very Japanese.
I do a lot of voice over for Japanese anime titles as well as live-action stuff and original stuff from the States. ‘Legion of Super Heroes,’ ‘New Wolverine: The X – Men’ animated series, ‘Afro Samurai’ and some live-action stuff, TV shows here and there – I like to mix it up.
Unlike the Japanese internment, water-boarding was ordered and served up in secret. But it, too, was America’s policy, not just Dick Cheney’s. Congress was informed about what was happening and raised no objection. The public knew, too.
One evening, Mike Myers and Steven Spielberg were discussing ‘Goldmember,’ and I just happened to joke, ‘If you need a Japanese character, let me know!’ The next day, they called me for audition! I find it’s always helpful to maintain a sense of humour.
Innovation and corporate governance are extremely important to improve the profitability of Japanese companies and encourage them to increase wages, capital spending, and dividends.
When the Japanese occupied Korea in the early 20th century, they brought their passion for baseball with them, and the game swiftly surpassed basketball and soccer as the nation’s pre-eminent sport.
We were worried at first that our music and message wouldn’t get across because we were singing in Japanese. But as we continued doing world tours, we realized and felt that music surpasses such things as language barriers, countries and race.
The Japanese are the ultimate students: they analyse things in so much detail… until they have pretty much mastered whatever they are studying.
The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.
In the postwar period, Americans turned away from quality as the principal goal of manufacturing and made cost the principal goal. Japanese, restructuring their companies, made exactly the opposite decision.
It’s a Japanese way of thinking, that I give value for my merchandise. So I don’t want to sell unnecessarily expensive dresses and make just 10 or 20 and then feel satisfied. I want to design for real women who can afford my dresses.
1936 is a very important year: a golden time for martial arts, right before the Japanese invasion.
I believe it is important that we Japanese write a constitution for ourselves that would reflect the shape of the country we consider desirable in the 21st century.
I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.
As the Japanese family gets more and more atomized, grandparents don’t live with the nuclear family, so parents of children can’t consult with their own parents about how to raise their children and rely on that to help raise them.
I really admire the great Japanese artists who could change their name three times in a lifetime. You could get rid of one and renew yourself.
One of my favourite Japanese cartoons is ‘Yasuragi no Yakata,’ written by the famous Fujiko Fujio.
The decision to use the atom bomb on Japanese cities, and the consequent buildup of enormous nuclear arsenals, was made by governments, on the basis of political and military perceptions.
In Hollywood, I was never restricted to just one Asian character. I’ve been cast as a Chinese, a Vietnamese, a Korean, a Japanese and a Cambodian.
I don’t really do Japanese interviews. I don’t think there’s much call for me in Japan.
Here’s the irony in what I do: When I go out to eat, I like classic French food. I like amazing Japanese food that has such a history that it goes back hundreds of years. And I also like really innovative food as well.
The film ‘The Cove’ made people aware of the Japanese slaughter of whales.
It’s a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody’s arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere.
Good movies are my weakness. I have seen several international movies ranging from English to Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese.
There’s a reason that there are oodles of young Aussies, Germans, Japanese, even Chinese backpackers traipsing around the world. They are unencumbered by debilitating student loans. No such luck for the American Theater Arts major with $120,000 in loans.
They got word that the Japanese planes were coming back, so we sunk her ourselves so the Japanese wouldn’t get it. We didn’t want the Japanese to get it intact.
The Japanese banks are not having an easy time as they once had.
I’m a huge Nagisa Oshima fan. He was one of the most radical Japanese directors to come up in the ’60s.
I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.
Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese – everything you learned in sixth grade social studies about the great American melting pot.
Our task force put to sea in early January 1942, to attack the Japanese in the Marshall and Gilbert islands, but the mission was called off on the eve of the attack.
I’m very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can’t think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not.
We recognize the distinctness of Asian art when we turn to its traditional forms, recognize it as Japanese, Chinese and Indian, even Balinese or Thai.
For those that don’t know, a Ronin is a Japanese word for masterless samurai and in the wrestling industry that is how I see myself.
I grew up in a unique environment where I was immersed in both Japanese and American cultures equally.
I have a lot of Japanese fans, but in Korea they seem to go crazy for me. I don’t know what it is, but they seem to like my style.
I’m a first-generation American. My parents are from Nigeria. I had this weird last name that looked Japanese, and then people would see me and go, ‘Oh. You’re not Japanese.’
I cherish our songs in both Japanese and English.
I love ‘Enter the Dragon,’ and I love Japanese movies. I love Jackie Chan movies; they are my heroes.
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found – indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
My dad is from Japanese descent, my mom is from Swedish descent and, through marriages and divorces, a pretty multicultural family – a lot of Spanish speakers in the family.
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, Danish, and Germans.
If we don’t do it, somebody else will. The Chinese, the Europeans and the Japanese all have the goal of going to the moon. Certainly we don’t want to wake up and see that they have a base there before we do.
The use of torture on suspected terrorists after Sept. 11 has already earned a place in American history’s hall of shame, alongside the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during World War II, and the excesses of the McCarthy era.
I never thought fashion was the job for me, because I’m Japanese. Clothes! That was a European, society thing.
But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We’d not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.
I had to trick people into giving me money for my first film. Making a romantic comedy is easier and more expected from a woman than it is to make a drama about a Japanese warrior.
Japanese players do not like being thrown into an arena in which they are given very little instruction. You can head in any direction, 360 degrees. They say, ‘What am I supposed to do? Give me hints. Provide me service instead of just throwing me into this arena.’
My observations of Japanese naval fighting men, their abilities and equipment led me to believe that they gave a better account of themselves than we did.
Shoji Ito was an Indophile like no other Japanese economist I have known. During the 1990s, he would frequently visit India to keep pace with the changes in the economy. We would always meet and have long conversations about India, Japan, and the world. Unfortunately, Ito-san died early.
Just as the Japanese pioneered a new form of manufacturing – lean production and quite new standards of reliability – so Tata, too, is embracing new forms of manufacture in order to revolutionise the price to meet the consumer needs of a poor, developing country.
We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo – men, women and children. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
Strong style is a philosophy for Japanese wrestling fans that was created by New Japan Pro Wrestling founder Antonio Inoki. He wanted you to show every motion and show real technique in the ring. It’s important to use real techniques from real life and real martial arts. The detail is important.
