I really love Japan, and I liked living there very much, and there are so many terrific things about Japan. However, I do think what's amazing is that Japan really prides itself on being monoracial. It doesn't have the same kind of idea as in the U.K. or Canada or the United States, in which the idea of diversity is a strength.

The typical big Japanese company has somewhere between a third and 40 percent of its revenues coming from developing countries, and about a third of Japan's exports are also to the emerging countries, so in a strange way, Japan, which has very little internal growth, its big companies are a good way to play the emerging markets.

With the United States in slow long-term decline, how will that affect the position of English? And where will all that leave monolingual Britain? Our political leaders like to boast about how global Britain is, but when it comes to languages, it is near the bottom of the global league, together with another island state, Japan.

Maitake mushrooms are known in Japan as 'the dancing mushroom.' According to a Japanese legend, a group of Buddhist nuns and woodcutters met on a mountain trail, where they discovered a fruiting of maitake mushrooms emerging from the forest floor. Rejoicing at their discovery of this delicious mushroom, they danced to celebrate.

I believe that the civilization India evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors, Rome went, Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken; Japan has become Westernized; of China nothing can be said; but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation.

At the beginning, my folks were pretty upset with the whole thing at first, the music, the tattoos - but after observing the music scene I'm in now for a couple of years, they totally get it - they actually love it. They are so proud. My dad actually flew to Japan to see us play. My mom comes to the shows near home in Washington.

When I was a young guy, when I first started with G.E., Jack Welch sent us all to Japan because in those days Japan was gonna crush us. And we learned a lot about Japan when we were there. But over the subsequent 30 years, the Japanese companies all fell behind. And the reason why they fell behind is because they didn't globalize.

There's the assumption being made by the national security advisers to the Obama administration that the North Korean leadership is not suicidal, that they know they will be obliterated if they attacked the United States. But I would point that everything in South Korea and Japan is well within range of what they might want to do.

We are on the verge of losing the traditional idea of the family, especially in Japan, where the declining birth rate shows no signs of stopping. This is precisely why I think we should consider with a sense of urgency what the new image of "family" should be like, and not fall into the nostalgism that days gone by were just better.

While our responses to the problems facing us immediately are also important, we cannot forget to carve out the future of Japan ten or one hundred years into the future. In doing so, we must not resort to superficial measures. Instead, it is imperative to engage in true reforms that ascertain the state of society we seek to achieve.

I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable.

Japan hosts more forward-deployed U.S. troops than any other country and serves as home port for our only forward-deployed aircraft carrier. In 2011, when a tsunami devastated Japan and created the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear facility, the United States stood shoulder-to-shoulder with our Japanese allies to respond and rebuild.

One of the happier ironies of recent history is that even as Tibet is being wiped off the map in Tibet itself, here it is in California, in Switzerland, in Japan. All over the world, Tibetan Buddhism is now part of the neighborhood. In 1968, there were two Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West. By 2000, there were 40 in New York alone.

When I was coaching at Kentucky - I was a grad assistant and I just got through playing and we won the NCAA Championship in 1978, so I stayed after I got through playing - we had Japan's national team coach Mototaka Kohama come to Lexington to spend the year and study basketball. He and I became great friends, so we hung out together.

Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating.

Me being from a Celtic culture that tends to emphasize directness, conflict, openness has a big effect on my living in Japan, which tends to focus on indirectness, avoidance of conflict and keeping things close to your chest. So that has led to quite a lot of cultural misunderstandings in dealing with this East Asian culture I live in.

Art should not be bound by barriers or language. The Hindi film industry is a testament to that. We speak only Hindi, but we premiere in Germany and Japan. Our films do phenomenally well there. We transcend the barriers of language and culture. We welcome you in. I think that's what art should be, and I hope America reaches that place.

[After Easy Rider] I couldn't get another movie, so I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years. I lived in Paris for a couple of years. I didn't take any photographs, and then I went to Japan and saw a Nikon used. I bought it, and I just started, like an alcoholic. I shot 300 rolls of film. That was the beginning of me starting again.

Following one of the most violent conflicts in human history, the United States and Japan built a deep and abiding friendship - an alliance that has underwritten unprecedented economic growth and security in the Asia Pacific for half a century. It is an alliance based on mutual interests and shared values and the ties between our people.

All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes prompt us to remember what in calmer times we are invariably minded to forget: the most stern and chilling of mantras, which holds, quite simply, that mankind inhabits this earth subject to geological consent - which can be withdrawn at any time.

To protect people's lives and keep our children safe, we must implement public-works spending and do so proudly. If possible, I'd like to see the Bank of Japan purchase all of the construction bonds that we need to issue to cover the cost. That would also forcefully circulate money in the market. That would be positive for the economy, too.

Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known.

There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make fotr the eruption of volcanos in the Torrid areas... The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the blink of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea.

There's no question in my mind that the times I was in my prime, I was the most well-rounded fighter out there - or in the world. I was the one who knew how to kickbox. I did kickbox and muay thai, I competed in events in Japan, and I was a submission specialist. Going into the UFC for the first time, I was the most well-rounded fighter there.

Irrespective of when this may happen, it would not be an exaggeration to say that today millions of people living in Russia and, I am sure, millions of people living in Japan have an urge to get to know each other, cooperate and exchange useful information, as well as a sincere desire that all problems that still remain unresolved be resolved.

I followed a girl I met in Japan to Los Angeles and ended up working in a motorcycle store. I quit the job one night, went to a party in the Hollywood Hills and ended up yelling at a bunch of people. Someone saw me yelling and asked me to be in a play. The first night, there was an agent in the audience who took me on and sent me out for jobs.

Population diminishing, even in Japan and Italy, the population is diminishing. When society can reach a sustainable place or gain comfortable income, then people tend to have fewer children. Poverty makes a chain reaction of having many children. So when society reaches some kind of level, then it will turn toward getting a smaller population.

Global central banks are working hard to lift their economies through an aggressively easy monetary policy. The ECB [European Central Bank] and BOJ [Bank of Japan] are buying tens of billions of bonds and other financial securities each month in an effort to stimulate their economies, which is pushing down rates everywhere, including in the U.S.

Living with a nuclear North Korea could give its leaders the confidence to act more aggressively versus South Korea. It could also, over time, drive both South Korea and Japan, as well as countries farther afield such as Vietnam, to reconsider their non-nuclear postures. The stability of a critical region of the world would suddenly be in doubt.

The worst part of what we heard Donald [trump] say has been about nuclear weapons. He has said repeatedly that he didn't care if other nations got nuclear weapons, Japan, South Korea, even Saudi Arabia. It has been the policy of the United States, Democrats and Republicans, to do everything we could to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Pittsburgh was the first chance to be in a classroom with other writers, to have conversations with other writers. In fact, after graduate school, I lived in Japan, Ohio and New Orleans, and only upon leaving Pittsburgh did I see what a special community it was for poets, so I was eager to come back. It's a strong arts community across the board.

Threats of trade protectionism, plus unilateral actions on the exchange-rate front, such as the heavy interventions of China, Japan, and Switzerland in the currency markets - not to mention the retaliatory tariffs recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives - endanger growth prospects and could further depress financial market confidence.

Selling five million units in less than 14 months means DS is the fastest among any game machines ever launched in Japan to hit that level. To achieve this rapid growth, we were required not only to go after frequent game players, but to reel back people who had left games and to make video games enjoyable for those who had not played games at all.

I understand that artists and critics make a big deal over the Grammys. But when I go to my shows and I'm selling out arenas in London, and when I'm in Australia and Japan, there aren't any Grammys there. There are human beings who I've touched. There are human beings who are inspired by me, who I love dearly. And that's what my career is based on.

Anyway, the US, as in most issues, is the best, has the best capability to lead, and really needs to lead. It doesn't [mean] that other countries won't pick different tacks and emphasize different things. In aggregate, they're almost half of the energy R&D. Europe, China, Japan - it's very important that they come along and contribute to these things.

As a matter of fact 25% of our U.S. investment banking business comes out of our commercial bank. So it's a competitive advantage for both the investment bank - which gets a huge volume of business - and the commercial bank because the commercial bank can walk into a company and say, "Oh, if you need X, Y and Z in Japan or China, we can do that for you."

The course of the line we indicated as forming our grandest terrestrial fold [along the shores of Japan] returns upon itself. It is an endless fold, an endless band, the common possession of two sciences. It is geological in origin, geographical in effect. It is the wedding ring of geology and geography, uniting them at once and for ever in indissoluble union.

The reactors in Japan are stable in the same way that a ticking time bomb is also stable. It wouldn't take much to light the fuse - a 6.6 earthquake, like what happened today in Japan, a pipe break, an over-pressurized containment vessel - anything could set it off, in which case we would have another Chernobyl, three times the magnitude of a Chernobyl accident.

In 2000 the then Prime Minister of Japan [Yoshirō Mori] asked me to return to this process, this conversation, these talks, and to do so, incidentally, on the basis of the 1956 declaration. I agreed. Since then we have conducted dialogue in this regard but I cannot say that our Japanese partners and friends have remained within the limits of the 1956 declaration.

As a peace machine, it's value to the world will be beyond computation. Would a declaration of war between Russia and Japan be made, if within an hour there after a swifty gliding aeroplane might take its flight from St Petersburg and drop half a ton of dynamite above the enemy's war offices? Could any nation afford to war upon any other with such hazards in view?

The US economy, because it's so energy wasteful, is much less efficient than either the European or Japanese economies. It takes us twice as much energy to produce a unit of GDP as it does in Europe and Japan. So, we're fundamentally less efficient and therefore less competitive, and the sooner we begin to tighten up, the better it will be for our economy and society.

One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.

Actually when I was wounded and recovering in Japan. I went to church there and I remember on the air base where their hospital was, I remember coming out of that church and feeling like I had been - at that point I just felt very, very close to God and that I'd done the right thing with my life. And I knew I wasn't going back to Vietnam. I just knew I wasn't going back.

When you have the countries like Germany, China, and Russia decline, and be replaced by others, that's when systemic wars start. That's when it gets dangerous, because they haven't yet reached a balance. So Germany united in 1871 and all hell broke loose. Japan rose in the early 20th century, and then you had chaos. So we're looking at a systemic shift. Be ready for war.

He'd once heard a story about a monastery on the top of some mountain in Japan or somewhere. After a long trek in the cold to get there, the monks would offer to sell you a cup of coffee. You had a choice: There was a two-dollar cup - or a two-hundred- dollar cup. When pressed to explain the difference, the monks were reported to say, 'A hundred and ninety-eight dollars.'

The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.

He thus reaps the full fruits which result from his toil and labors with the incentive of free enterprise to maximize his effort to achieve increasing production. Representing over a half of Japan's total population, the agriculture workers have become an invincible barrier against the advance of socialistic ideas which would relegate all to the indignity of state servitude.

As for these 60 years, and in general more than a hundred years, we have had different periods in relations and there have been tragic pages in our history, but since 1956 when we restored diplomatic relations, regrettably, we have not had a foundation on which to build ties that would correspond to our wishes and that are currently required in bilateral cooperation with Japan.

If you go to Japan, they're still buying vinyl, and they want the education. They know who's playing on what tracks from the '60s and the '70s - who the guitar player is, who the drummer is, who the producer was, what studio it was recorded in. That's how I grew up listening to music. We bought albums. We read the liner notes. It was important to know the whole history behind it.

When I was working in Japan, I created a system for ensuring that intelligence data was globally recoverable in the event of a disaster. I was not aware of the scope of mass surveillance. I came across some legal questions when I was creating it. My superiors pushed back and were like, "Well, how are we going to deal with this data?" And I was like, "I didn't even know it existed."

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