Japanese American Quotes

#1. But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.

George Takei

#2. My father is a Japanese-American and my mother is a Caucasian. So obviously, New Year's Day is big for our family, you know, oshogatsu. We had obon festivals every year. All those things.

Scott Fujita

#3. I love Jet Li, but he looks very Chinese, and his English is Chinese-accented. He wouldn't have been the right guy to play a Japanese-American.

Barry Eisler

#4. During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.

Tom Brokaw

#5. Telling cyclists to get out of the road is like telling women to get out of the voting booth and go back into the kitchen, or telling Japanese-American people to Go back to China!

BikeSnobNYC

#6. I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater. And I've been able to wed the two passions.

George Takei

#7. Dr. Margaret Oda, a true trailblazer in education, served as Honolulu school district superintendent and was the driving force behind the middle-school concept and the first chairwoman of the Japanese American National Museum.

Colleen Hanabusa

#8. I don't speak Japanese, I don't know anything about Japanese business or Japanese culture. Apart from sushi. But I can't exactly go up to him and say "Sushi!" out of the blue. It would be like going up to a top American businessman and saying, "T-bone steak!

Sophie Kinsella

#9. The "patron saint" of Japanese quality control, ironically, is an American named W. Edwards Deming, who was virtually unknown in his own country until his ideas of quality control began to make such a big impact on Japanese companies.

Akio Morita

#10. We call Japanese soldiers fanatics when they die rather than surrender, whereas American soldiers who do the same thing are called heroes.

Robert M. Hutchins

#11. The American public has been persistently told that the Korean people are a degenerate and contemptible nation, incapable of better things, intellectually inferior, and better off under Japanese rule than independent.

Homer B. Hulbert

#12. 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.

Jay Inslee

#13. We were American citizens. We were incarcerated by our American government in American internment camps here in the United States. The term 'Japanese internment camp' is both grammatically and factually incorrect.

George Takei

#14. I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

Chris Abani

#15. My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.

Sandra Cisneros

#16. Obviously, I love Japanese food. My favorite TV show of all time, without exception, is 'Iron Chef.' Not the stupid American version; 'Iron Chef' Japanese; the real one, the one that was on in Japan ... my DVR for years was set to record almost every single 'Iron Chef' episode.

Tucker Max

#17. I'm not American. I still have my Japanese citizenship.

Masi Oka

#18. From the American retelling of Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story to the Japanese adaptation of King Lear in Ran, Shakespeare's cultural influence is virtually limitless.

Gordon Smith

#19. Paprika is evidence that Japanese animators are reaching for the moon, while most of their American counterparts remain stuck in the kiddie sandbox.

Manohla Dargis

#20. For every American who died, the Japanese lost 6 people, the Germans 11, and the Russians 92.

Andrew Roberts

#21. I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

Haruki Murakami

#22. I was fortunate to live for 3 years in another country, and although we lived in an American compound, still as a young adolescent I did venture into the world of the Japanese with great interest and enjoyment. But many Americans never left that safe and familiar life among their own people.

Lois Lowry

#23. The moment the first American soldier sets foot on the Japanese mainland, all prisoners of war will be shot.

Hideki Tojo

#24. As the interned American citizens of Japanese descent learned, the Bill of Rights provided them with little protection when it was needed.

Glenn Reynolds

#25. When a Japanese manufacturer was asked by his North American counterpart, What is the best language in which to do business?" the man responded: "My customer's language

Leonard Sweet

#26. In 1986, when I was 21, I lived in Tokyo for four months, boarding with a Japanese family and working for an American company.

John Burnham Schwartz

#27. The difficulty of learning spoken English for a person profoundly deaf from an early age has been likened to a hearing American trying to learn spoken Japanese while locked within a soundproof glass cubicle.

Andrew Solomon

#28. What are you? German? American? English? Greek? Japanese? Turkish? French? Indian? Chinese? These are not real, these are virtual! You are human! This is what is real!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#29. My Japanese isn't much better today, but at least now I appreciate my duality more than when I was a punk kid.

Gil Asakawa

#30. 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.

Dave Barry

#31. 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 workers. That's the real competition.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

#32. The main American naval forces were shifted to the Pacific region and an American admiral made a strong declaration to the effect that if war were to break out between Japan and the United States, the Japanese navy could be sunk in a matter of weeks.

Hideki Tojo

#33. It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.

Curtis Sittenfeld

#34. I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture.

Christian Marclay

#35. I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.

Iain Banks

#36. The Japanese Navy not only outgunned American forces in the Pacific but proved more powerful in that ocean than the combined navies of the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

James M. Scott

#37. The rise of anime had to happen. If the Japanese could tell better American stories, it would go through the roof. They still tell stories which are very much oriental. I take my hat off to them.

Ralph Bakshi

#38. A war in the Taiwan Strait would destroy China's international relations overnight. It would destroy Chinese - Japanese relations, not to mention Chinese - American relations.

William Kirby

#39. neither the NAACP nor any other predominantly African American organization filed an amicus brief challenging Japanese internment in the World War II case of Korematsu v. United States.

Richard Delgado

#40. I've been working with Spanish, French, some more American, and Japanese directors. And then I realized I have to study English, and that's why I moved to New York two years ago.

Rinko Kikuchi

#41. 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.

J. Maarten Troost

#42. As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

Arthur Golden

#43. It seems like the best escape games come from Japan for some reason. It makes me proud.

Denis Markell

#44. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps.

Michele Bachmann

#45. While foreign competitors, French or Japanese or German, merrily bid for contracts abroad, American companies find themselves tangled in a web of legislation designed to express disapproval, block trade in certain commodities, or perhaps deny resources to disfavored or hostile regimes.

Elliott Abrams

#46. Dashi remains unfamiliar to most French and American cooks, who tend to reach for a bouillon cube to do many of the same things. But dashi is worth preparing and using the way the Japanese do: for poaching fish, as a soup base, and in simmered dishes.

Nobu Matsuhisa

#47. The weekend brought good news for our friends in the cattle industry. At long last, Japan has taken the steps needed for American beef to make its way back into the Japanese market.

Randy Neugebauer

#48. Psychologically, Japanese women depend largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, they could be criticized for living in a female ghetto, and yet they have what some American feminists are trying to build, a "women's culture" with its own customs, values and even language.

Kittredge Cherry

#49. We made air attacks on the Japanese anchorage, sinking and damaging several vessels. However, the Japanese were alerted to the fact that American carriers were nearby.

Jack Adams

#50. I am inspired by both Japanese Samurai films, in particular the films of Kurosawa, and how they share the spirit of American Westerns, with the influences running in both directions, and including the 'Spaghetti Westerns' and films of Sam Peckinpah.

Ann Nocenti

#51. Hollywood industry people are very spoiled. I don't think they can adjust to the insane, no-money, super-hard working tradition of Japanese filmmaking. I don't think any American can go through that. They don't want to work more than twelve hours and they want Saturday and Sunday off.

Ryuhei Kitamura

#52. To American ears, the Filipino pronunciation of the word "evacuate" sounded more like "bokweet." They soon further Americanized it to "buckwheat," which would become guerilla slang meaning to place as much distance between oneself and the Japanese as possible.

John D. Lukacs

#53. I think that American people really know how to pursue fun, they really know how to have a good time. Japanese are somewhat more reserved than Americans, so I'm jealous.

Nobuo Uematsu

#54. Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.

Malcolm Gladwell

#55. I'm weird - I don't really listen to American music while I'm writing. I do occasionally get an anthem song, but generally speaking, when I write, I only listen to Japanese and Hawaiian music.

Violet Duke

#56. My CIA godfather told me he'd never heard any American speak Japanese so well.

Steven Seagal

#57. There aren't many American directors here trying to direct a Japanese yakuza film. When you combine that with the fact that I don't speak much Japanese and this was an independent film I was financing myself - people were curious about what I was doing.

John Foster

#58. Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don't have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.

Sam Harris

#59. Japanese attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes.

Akio Morita

#60. American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born japanese.

Ryu Murakami

#61. The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#62. I'd had a relationship with a French girl, a Japanese girl, an American girl, a Filippina and she was there all the time - a Lancashire girl. I thought: 'It's a Lancashire girl I was looking for. Why didn't I realize it?'

David Thewlis

#63. People don't put as much of an emphasis in expanding their choices, so that, you know, one of the things that I learned when I was in Japan way back in the 1990's and there were all these quarrels happening between the U.S. and Japan about allowing more American products into the Japanese market.

Sheena Iyengar

#64. So, fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately consumed by Americans. They are more American than anything else.

Jennifer Lee

#65. Till the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, most American men wore hats to work. What happened? Did our guys - suddenly scouting overhead for worse Sunday raids - come to fear their hatbrims' interference?

Allan Gurganus

#66. Through my willingness to train every day and to dig deep in the after-class ukemi sessions, over time I earned the respect and friendship of my training partners, who were mostly Japanese men sincerely surprised to find themselves training with an American woman.

Linda Holiday

#67. Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers

#68. 'Shall We Dance?' takes a small, exquisite Japanese movie and turns it into a big, stupid American movie. Still, it must be said that as glossy and overproduced as the thing is, it's a good big, stupid American movie.

Stephen Hunter

#69. The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.

Ruth Ozeki

#70. There are also a number of humans living up there (Canada), and in many ways they have a lifestyle quite similar to ours, including such traditional American activities as driving Japanese cars.

Dave Barry

#71. Japan has the oldest population in the world, and the Japanese go to the doctor more than anybody - about fourteen office visits per year, compared with five for the average American. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person on health care each year; we burn through $7,400 per person.

T.R. Reid

#72. I didn't understand the American fascination with the Japanese schoolgirl. No, I don't think I can, really.

Chiaki Kuriyama

#73. To attract boyfriends, American girls pretend they are women, while Japanese women pretend they are girls.

Kittredge Cherry