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75fa6bc
|
Every once in a while she'll get worked up and cry like that. But that's ok. She's letting her feelings out. The scary thing is not being able to do that. Then your feelings build up and harden and die inside. That's when you're in big trouble.
|
|
norwegian-wook
murakami
japan
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
2354b77
|
It's a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.
|
|
inner-self
japan
psychology
|
James Clavell |
|
96ed8fd
|
"In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. "The entire EU is short on coins." And I say, "Really?" because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like "We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god."
|
|
euros
tokyo
hospitality
japan
cashiers
europe
paris
|
David Sedaris |
|
3c4cc99
|
From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.
|
|
pain
existence
life
coexist
find-a-way
haruki-murakam
the-wind-up-bird-chronicle
murakami
intense
center
japanese
painful
japan
exist
purpose
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
cded63f
|
There are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like super strength and super speed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people's minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves by just being there.
|
|
love
superpowers
superheroes
grandma
japan
|
Ruth Ozeki |
|
92f7996
|
There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.
|
|
books
death
ways-to-die
hiroshima
wwii
japan
world-war-ii
|
John Hersey |
|
2225867
|
Things changing, failing apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn't give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don't even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them.
|
|
bryan
easton
ellis
the-informers
japan
|
Bret Easton Ellis |
|
2cd236c
|
The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground
|
|
japan
terrorism
law
media
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
1b1e195
|
After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there.
|
|
struggle
loneliness
life
japan
|
Ryū Murakami |
|
d97c7a0
|
I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal. College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain. Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed--maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.
|
|
good-intentions
modernism
existential-crisis
japan
novel
introspection
psychology
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
2f0d142
|
"Only the framing material," Lucas demurely, "obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known in my crib, God."
|
|
ghost-in-the-shell
hideo-kojima
mgs
video-games
cyberpunk
japan
sci-fi
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
a9d7c7d
|
Yet for the first time in three days, I want something. I want the forest lord to turn me into a cedar. The very oldest islanders say that if you are in the interior mountains on the night when the forest lord counts his trees, he includes you in the number and turns you into a tree.
|
|
japan
|
David Mitchell |
|
ec30eae
|
They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.
|
|
murder
japanese-literature
japanese
japan
|
Ryū Murakami |
|
cb9058b
|
The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.
|
|
reality
imagination
the-wind-up-bird-chronicle
haruki-murakami
murakami
flee
japanese
flight
japan
imagine
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
40e709d
|
It was as if - this something I thought of only later, of course - she was gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.
|
|
japan
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
c79dea9
|
We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light--his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.
|
|
beauty
light-and-darkness
far-east
intercultural
japanese-literature
japan
shadows
|
Junichirō Tanizaki |
|
818d74d
|
[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who had actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation. Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. 'Culture' is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to.
|
|
visual
emotional
wabi-sabi
design
japan
value
simplicity
|
Alain de Botton |
|
c155797
|
"Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears."
|
|
fiction
geisha
memoirs
japan
|
Arthur Golden |
|
f40196a
|
This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited refugees--partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only buildings; partly because the foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the estate's exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic urge to hide under leaves.
|
|
war
explosion
hiroshima
foliage
bomb
japan
hide
|
John Hersey |
|
7bfefd1
|
Out of the ugliness of the ironworks lepers will eat, children will be born, their parents will grow old.
|
|
hayao-miyazaki
japan
film
|
Helen McCarthy |
|
3b315a0
|
Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.
|
|
1953
curtis-lemay
division-of-korea
hermit-kingdom
japan
korea
korea-under-japanese-rule
korean-demilitarized-zone
korean-war
mao-zedong
siberia
south-korea
pyongyang
world-war-ii
joseph-stalin
kim-il-sung
north-korea
china
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
36a609c
|
New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, shortly after the war: The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26. Such then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.
|
|
war
japan
|
Howard Zinn |
|
46f2b89
|
Das Fegen der Wandelgange ist eine lastige Angelegenheit an diesem Nachmittag: Kaum sind die Blatter und Piniennadeln zusammengekehrt, blast der Wind den Haufen davon. Wolken ziehen uber dem Kahlen Gipfel auf und verschutten eisigen Nieselregen.
|
|
german
japan
|
David Mitchell |
|
bf54118
|
"Word has it . . . the stone is from Japan, it's very ancient, it belonged to a shogun in the eleventh century." - a taxidermist"
|
|
ancient-stone
eleventh-century
shogun
taxidermist
anthony-doerr
japan
stone
ancient
|
Anthony Doerr |
|
00af54d
|
But Tokyo offers cat cafes, a commercial solution to the problem of wanting to commune with cats but being unwilling or unable to have one at home. Iris's favorite cat cafe is Nekorobi, in the Ikebukuro neighborhood. When I first heard about cat cafes, I imagined something like Starbucks with a cat on your lap. Wrong. Nekorobi is what you'd get if you asked a cat-obsessed kid to draw a floorplan of her dream apartment: a bathroom, a drink vending machine(free with admission), a snack table, video games, and about ten cats and their attendant toys, scratching posts, beds, and climbing structures. Oh, and the furniture is in the beanbag chic style. Considering all the attention they get, the cats were amazingly friendly, and I'd never seen such a variety of cat breeds up close. (Nor have I ever spent more than ten seconds thinking about cat breeds.) My favorite was a light gray cat with soft fur, which curled up and slept near me while I sat on a beanbag and read a book. Iris made the rounds, drinking a bottomless cup of the vitamin-fortified soda C.C. Lemon and making sure to give equal time to each cat, including the flat-faced feline that looked like it had beaned with a skillet in old-timey cartoon fashion.
|
|
cat-cafe
nekorobi
japan
cats
|
Matthew Amster-Burton |
|
99d994c
|
True, there's an aisle devoted to foreign foods, and then there are familiar foods that have been through the Japanese filter and emerged a little bit mutated. Take breakfast cereal. You'll find familiar American brands such as Kellogg's, but often without English words anywhere on the box. One of the most popular Kellogg's cereals in Japan is Brown Rice Flakes. They're quite good, and the back-of-the-box recipes include cold tofu salad and the savory pancake , each topped with a flurry of crispy rice flakes. Iris and I got mildly addicted to a Japanese brand of dark chocolate cornflakes, the only chocolate cereal I've ever eaten that actually tastes like chocolate. (Believe me, I've tried them all.) Stocking my pantry at Life Supermarket was fantastically simple and inexpensive. I bought soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, rice, salt, and sugar. (I was standing right in front of the salt when I asked where to find it This happens to me every time I ask for help finding any item in any store.) Total outlay: about $15, and most of that was for the rice. Japan is an unabashed rice protectionist, levying prohibitive tariffs on imported rice. As a result, supermarket rice is domestic, high quality, and very expensive. There were many brands of white rice to choose from, the sacks advertising different growing regions and rice varieties. (I did the restaurant wine list thing and chose the second least expensive.) Japanese consumers love to hear about the regional origins of their foods. I almost never saw ingredients advertised as coming from a particular farm, like you'd see in a farm-to-table restaurant in the U.S., but if the milk is from Hokkaido, the rice from Niigata, and the tea from Uji, all is well. I suppose this is not so different from Idaho potatoes and Florida orange juice. When I got home, I opened the salt and sugar and spooned some into small bowls near the stove. The next day I learned that Japanese salt and sugar are hygroscopic: their crystalline structure draws in water from the air (and Tokyo, in summer, has enough water in the air to supply the world's car washes). I figured this was harmless and went on licking slightly moist salt and sugar off my fingers every time I cooked.
|
|
kellogs
rice
supermarket
sugar
salt
japan
inventory
|
Matthew Amster-Burton |
|
fbd051c
|
If a Tokyoite knows anything about Nakano, it's likely to be Nakano Broadway, a shopping mall with several floors devoted to Japanese comics (manga) and animation (anime). It is geek central. I found most of it incomprehensible, but I did enjoy browsing at Junkworld, which sells useful electronic discards, like old working digital cameras for $5 and assorted connectors and dongles and sound cards. In the 1980's, when William Gibson was padding around the streets of Tokyo and inventing the world of , Japan was the place where the future had already arrived, where you could find electronic toys that wouldn't hit American shelves for years, if ever. For a variety of reasons (blogs and online shopping, advances in international shipping, the fact that the coolest mobile phones are now designed in Silicon Valley and Seoul), this is no longer true. While it's still fun to go to Akihabara at night and shop all seven floors of a neon-lit electronics superstore, you won't bring home any objects of nerdy wet dreams.
|
|
nakano
electronics
japan
manga
|
Matthew Amster-Burton |
|
37477bf
|
Dairy Chiko, in the basement of Nakano Broadway, is a surrealist ice cream shop known for octuple-decker soft-serve cones. You can also order a smaller cone with less than one billion calories, but the draw at Dairy Chiko is watching how other people eat their towering cones of vanilla, yuzu, milk tea, matcha, ramune, orange, strawberry, and chocolate (flavors may vary). Walking while eating is taboo in Japan, and Dairy Chiko has no seating area, so people loiter near the stand, two to a cone, drawing spoons up the sides of the ice cream, trying to forestall the inevitable. Old ladies, meanwhile, usually order a small matcha cone and eat it with a spoon, avoiding the shame of a green milk mustache. Near Dairy Chiko is a cafe with a public seating area and a very angry-looking drawing of an eight-layer cone with the international NO symbol superimposed on it.
|
|
tokyo
ice-cream
japan
|
Matthew Amster-Burton |
|
dc2f9cf
|
In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust.
|
|
faith
trust
god
canadian
japanese
japan
|
Joy Kogawa |
|
d5deb04
|
I've long been a fan of Hi-Chew, the Japanese fruit chews, for their resilient texture and uncannily accurate fruit flavors: sour cherry, apple, grape, pickled plum, and especially mango, which is closer to the flavor of an actual tropical mango than most imported mangoes.
|
|
mango
flavors
japan
fruit
|
Matthew Amster-Burton |
|
de9bdb8
|
Finally, let's talk about those Kit Kat bars. There is no flavor that can be embodied in Kit Kat form and sold in Japanese stores. Green tea. Black tea. Miso. Cherry blossom. Soy sauce. Toasted soybean powder ( ). Chile. Orange. Melon. Only a few are available at any given time, and right now, evil geniuses at Nestle are coming up with new flavors. I'd like to suggest okonomiyaki flavor, which would consist of a bag of assorted flavors (ginger, squid, mountain yam, egg) that could be combined in the proportions of your choice, just like a real okonomiyaki. Sauce and Kewpie mayo optional. We bought a SkyTree orange Kit Kat, was a regular orange Kit Kat in a preposterously long box, and the Yubari melon Kit Kat, which tasted exactly like melon, was sold in a fancy gift box, and cost $200. Two-thirds of that is true.
|
|
fruity
kitkats
natural-flavors
japan
|
Matthew Amster-Burton |
|
98a9fc3
|
The first anomalous structure that was discovered at Yonaguni lies below glowering cliffs of the southern shore of the island. Local divers call it Iseki Point ('Monument Point'). Into its south face, at a depth of about 18 metres, an area of terracing with conspicuous flat planes and right-angles has been cut. Two huge parallel blocks weighing approximately 30 tonnes each and separated by a gap of less than 10 centimetres, have been placed upright side by side at its north-west corner. In about 5 metres of water at the very top of the structure there is a kidney-shaped 'pool' and near by is a feature that many divers believe is a crude rock-carved image of a turtle. At the base of the mnoument, in 27 metres of water, there is a clearly defined stone-paved path oriented towards the east.
|
|
underwater-monument
yonaguni
deep-human-history
ice-age-civilizations
monument
japan
|
Graham Hancock |