Traditional Japanese Sayings

#1. There is an unspoken feminist layer to Katana. She's an aggressive modern woman with traditional Japanese roots. She was in love with her sword because she believed it contained her husband.

Ann Nocenti

#2. Well, dojo is a traditional Japanese word for training hall.

Joseph Jarman

#3. After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.

Harry Seidler

#4. Cleaning is considered a vital part of the training process in all traditional Japanese disciplines and is a required practice for any novice. It is accorded spiritual significance. Purifying an unclean place is believed to purify the mind.

Mineko Iwasaki

#5. If you're very, very conservative and you like that sort of practice, go find a very conservative Zen master and just do traditional Japanese practice, which is not that traditional actually.

Frederick Lenz

#6. The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe the smiles off European faces.

Niall Ferguson

#7. Tokyo in the late 1960s seemed to be like one of the futures that science fiction presents. Here was the proto- super-technology of the future, electronically, robotically, blahblahblah, intercut with traditional Japanese cultural patterns, Shinto patterns.

Ian Watson

#8. 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.

F. Sionil Jose

#9. There are some ghost stories in Japan where - when you are sitting in the bathroom in the traditional style of the Japanese toilet - a hand is actually starting to grab you from beneath. It's a very scary story.

Shigeru Miyamoto

#10. But Istanbul is a city of easy forgettings. Things are written in water over there, except the works of my master, which are written in stone.

Elif Shafak

#11. Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

Tadao Ando

#12. I don't think much about the digital world ... because I am in the analog world!

William Eggleston

#13. 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

#14. Whether Canada ends up as o-ne national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion.

Stephen Harper

#15. 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

#16. I often look ridiculous in Japan. There's really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

Anthony Bourdain

#17. We need somebody ready to be commander-in-chief on day one, who understands there are no moderates in Iran; they've been killed a long time ago.

Lindsey Graham

#18. A man without mirth is like wagon without springs, in which one is caused disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it turns.

Henry Ward Beecher

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. New Rule: Instead of killing 99.9 percent of germs, Lysol has to just go ahead and kill them all. Why spare the remaining 0.1 percent? So they can return to their villages and tell the other germs, "Dude, do not mess with Lysol"?

Bill Maher

#23. 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