Quotes About Japanese Culture

#1. When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.

Tadao Ando

#2. I guess anime helped me understand the Japanese culture a little better and makes me want to honor certain language nuances that don't always translate to English.

Laura Bailey

#3. Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama.

J.M. Roberts

#4. The significance of the cherry blossom tree in Japanese culture goes back hundreds of years. In their country, the cherry blossom represents the fragility and the beauty of life. It's a reminder that life is almost overwhelmingly beautiful but that it is also tragically short.

Homaro Cantu

#5. 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

#6. I think that the Japanese culture is one of the very few cultures left that is its own entity. They're just so traditional and so specific in their ways. It's kind of untouched, it's not Americanized.

Toni Collette

#7. The social problem is that we haven't come up with any alternative models. Our culture hasn't developed an ars erotica. Think, for example, of conditions in India or in Japanese culture and of how the erotic has been cultivated there. They're not as clinical and rabbit-like as we are.

Volkmar Sigusch

#8. It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten. It is a great intellectual challenge and a gorgeous sensual experience.

Alain Ducasse

#9. There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They're like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.

Ann Nocenti

#10. Japan, not only a mega-busy city that thrives on electronics and efficiency, actually has an almost sacred appreciation of nature. One must travel outside of Tokyo to truly experience the 'old Japan' and more importantly feel these aspects of Japanese culture.

Apolo Ohno

#11. I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.

Philip Warren Anderson

#12. In Japanese culture it is said that if a vase is accidently broken and then glued back together, it becomes even more beautiful... regardless of its defects. It can be the same with people.

Jose N. Harris

#13. Japan is the most intoxicating place for me. In Kyoto, there's an inn called the Tawaraya which is quite extraordinary. The Japanese culture fascinates me: the food, the dress, the manners and the traditions. It's the travel experience that has moved me the most.

Roman Coppola

#14. I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.

Richard Flanagan

#15. In Japan itself it seemed as if theory had been absorbed the same way Japanese media culture absorbed everything else - by turning it into a spectacular subcultural style.

McKenzie Wark

#16. Bushido refers not only to martial rectitude but personal rectitude. We understand that in serving each other we serve our own interests.
In serving our world, our world serves us. Allowing us to live in harmony with it.

Rick Remender

#17. There is no geometry here; or rather there is a secret, infinitely non-Eucledian and subtle geometry, a secret harmony that the mind seizes before the intelligence.

Alan Macfarlane

#18. Japan is very cosmopolitan - it values its origins, but a world view hovers above this narrow perspective. The interest of the Japanese in their folk culture is transcendental.

F. Sionil Jose

#19. I think that the Japanese - and I do love Japanese cuisine and adore Japanese food culture - I think that they're going to plow through the entire world's fishing. They're going to eat everything anyways.

David Chang

#20. The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

Kenzaburo Oe

#21. For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.

Yukio Mishima

#22. O-suzu left whatever work she was doing at her sewing machine and dragged Takeo back to O-yoshi and her son.
How dare you behave so selfishly! Now tell O-yoshi-san that you are sorry. Get down on the mats and make a proper bow!

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#23. I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.

Arthur Golden

#24. Even if there are no new Mighty Atom manga or films created, the Mighty Atom character has become a permanent fixture of both Japanese and global pop culture.

Frederik L. Schodt

#25. This was her heritage. Her people. So why did she feel so small and weak? So far removed from it?

Linda Gerber

#26. Psychologically speaking (I'll only wheel out the amateur psychology just this once, so bear with me), encounters that call up strong physical disgust or revulsion are often in fact projections of our own faults and weaknesses.

Haruki Murakami

#27. I feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.'

Ernest Cline

#28. Life in Japan, nowadays, is nothing like a Kurosawa movie, and only the contemptible Weeaboo thinks that it is. In order to be a whole, well-rounded Otaku, you need to be up on Japanese popular culture, as much as you may be up on anime, samurai philosophy or the canon of Square Enix games.

Alexei Maxim Russell

#29. At the age of 25, I gave up my study of Japanese language and culture at university in Brisbane and moved to the town of Alice Springs.

Robyn Davidson

#30. 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

#31. Japanese had never seen a Western-style circus, and most of them had probably never seen foreigners, either.

Frederik L. Schodt

#32. We hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social movements.

Theodore C. Bestor

#33. Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic.

David Cronenberg

#34. 47 Ronin is a very special movie for me. Not only a Samurai thing. Not only a Hollywood fantasy. It has a very special mixture between Japanese traditional culture and Western culture for the costume, set, story. Everything. I believe it will be a very special film that no one has ever seen.

Hiroyuki Sanada

#35. Never settle for normal, Miss Lyons," Shinzo told her. "Normal is not natural. Extraordinary is natural, and that's why you're here. To do something extraordinary.

Kaylin McFarren

#36. The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.

Jack Gilbert

#37. In Japanese swordsmanship, it is not uncommon to speak of a unity of mind, body, and sword.

H.E. Davey

#38. I took Japanese in high school. I'm Chinese, though, and I just fell in love with the language and the culture.

Matthew Moy

#39. 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

#40. I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

Anthony Bourdain

#41. Manga uses Japanese traditional structures in how to teach the student and to transmit a very direct message. You learn from the teacher by watching from behind his back. The whole teacher-master thing is part of Asian culture, I think.

Takashi Murakami

#42. The ditties blend Japanese popular culture themes of saccharine, childlike goodness and viciously detached sadism, which Aum drew upon as it tapped the barely suppressed rage of the young against their society.

Robert Jay Lifton

#43. If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#44. The best way to tell whether the Norwegian is a Norwegian is to say:
"Are you Swedish?"
Regardless whether you say this in English, French, Italian, Japanese, Urdu or Swahili, he will answer:
"Swedish? Me? I'm a Norwegian!"
Then you will be able to tell.

Odd Borretzen

#45. Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.

Masaharu Morimoto

#46. Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.

Tadao Ando

#47. The highest goal is not distinctions, but synthesis and harmony.

Alan Macfarlane

#48. Like Americans, the Japanese have a silent mode, but in Japan it can be referred to as "manner mode" (Japanese Cell Phone Culture, n.d.).

Trevor Clinger

#49. I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven't a clue about my own logic.

Deborah Levy

#50. But it speaks for an inner world - and again this is evident in Murakami - that sits in a different dimension from the smooth-running, flawlessly attentive, and all but anonymous machine that keeps public order moving forward so efficiently in Japan.

Pico Iyer

#51. I've been studying the cultures of Asia for many years, and I'm very attracted to the culture of Japan, in particular to the impact Zen has had on the Japanese mind and spirit.

John McLaughlin

#52. Japan is not a Western democracy. The Japanese have kept their traditions, culture and heritage, but they have joined the community of free nations.

Natan Sharansky

#53. I have come to the conclusion that just as the Japanese live to work, Asians live to eat.

Anastacia Oaikhena