Japanese American Quotes & Sayings

Almost every woman had a primary role in the "female-dominated" family structure; only a small percentage of men had a primary role in the "male-dominated" governmental and religious structures. Many mothers were, in a sense, the chair of the board of a small company - their family. Even in Japan, women are in charge of the family finances - a fact that was revealed to the average American only after the Japanese stock market crashed in 1992 and thousands of women lost billions of dollars that their husbands never knew they had invested.23 Conversely, most men were on their company's assembly line - either its physical assembly line or its psychological assembly line. — Warren Farrell

In World War II, some Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own lives rather become prisoners of war. In Saipan hundreds of civilians jumped to their deaths over cliffs in order to avoid falling into American hands. Even in life-or-death situations cultural ties and duties often outweigh the instinct for survival. This is why people die in the attempt to rescue a dog from drowning, or decide to become suicide bombers. — Harald Welzer

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

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

Stalin's position in east Asia was now rather good. If the Japanese meant to fight the United States for control of the Pacific, it was all but inconceivable that they would confront the Soviets in Siberia. Stalin no longer had to fear a two-front war. What was more, the Japanese attack was bound to bring the United States into the war - as an ally of the Soviet Union. By early 1942 the Americans had already engaged the Japanese in the Pacific. Soon American supply ships would reach Soviet Pacific ports, unhindered by Japanese submarines - since the Japanese were neutral in the Soviet-German war. A Red Army taking American supplies from the east was an entirely different foe than a Red Army concerned about a Japanese attack from the east. Stalin just had to exploit American aid, and encourage the Americans to open a second front in Europe. Then the Germans would be encircled, and the Soviet victory certain. — Timothy Snyder

Activist Supreme Courts are not new. The Dred Scott decision in 1856, imposing slavery in free territories; the Plessy decision in 1896, imposing segregation on a private railroad company; the Korematsu decision in 1944, upholding Franklin Roosevelt's internment of American citizens, mostly Japanese Americans; and the Roe decision in 1973, imposing abortion on the entire nation; are examples of the consequences of activist Courts and justices. — Mark Levin

Think of the sushi trend that started in the '80s. It was as much about the Nintendo entertainment system in your living room as it was about the availability of good-quality raw fish. The Japanese food trend rose as the world of Japanese business and culture was becoming a bigger part of American life. — David Sax

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

To attract boyfriends, American girls pretend they are women, while Japanese women pretend they are girls. — Kittredge Cherry

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

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state. "The Japanese want their kids to struggle," said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who cowrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. "Sometimes the [Japanese] teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding. — Daniel Coyle

As an American, you appreciate the importance of our security alliance, the importance of the economic ties between our two countries, and while I knew of the two bonds between our two people, until I came here, I didn't really appreciate how deep the people-to-people connections are between the American people and the Japanese people. — John Roos

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

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

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

I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s. — Bruce Feiler

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

My father told me about American democracy. And he said you have to be actively engaged in the political process to make our democracy work. So I've been doing that my entire life. Civil rights movement. The peace movement during the Vietnam conflict. The movement to get an apology and redress for Japanese-Americans. — George Takei

Can o'Beans was to remark that a comparison between the American Cowpoke and, say, the Japanese samurai, left the cowboy looking rather shoddy. 'Before a samurai went into battle,' Can o' Beans was to say, 'he would burn incense in his helmet so that if his enemy took his head, he would find it pleasant to his nose. Cowboys, on the other hand, hardly ever bathed or changed their crusty clothing. If a samurai's enemy lost his sword, the samurai gave him his extra one so that the fight might continue in a manner honorable and fair. The cowboy's specialty was to shoot enemies in the back from behind a bush. Do you begin to see the difference?' Spoon and Dirty Sock would wonder how Can o' Beans knew so much about samurai. 'Oh, I sat on the shelf next to a box of imported rice crackers for over a month,' Can o' Beans would explain. 'One can learn a lot conversing with foreigners. — Tom Robbins

The weapons attacking her were a diverse mix: antiques such as American carbines, Czech-style machine guns, Japanese Type-38 rifles; newer weapons such as standard-issue People's Liberation Army rifles and submachine guns, stolen from the PLA after the publication of the "August Editorial"; and even a few Chinese dadao swords and spears. — Liu Cixin

Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service. The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow. — W. Edwards Deming

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the death of Princess Diana. This accident involved an English citizen, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before. — Mark Riebling

It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun. — Trevanian

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

Few would argue against safe-guarding the nation. But in the judgment of at least one of the country's most distinguished presidential scholars, the legal steps taken by the Bush Administration in its war against terrorism were a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country's history and traditions: more significant than John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, than Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, than the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Collectively, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, the Bush Administration's extralegal counter-terrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history. — Jane Mayer

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

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

For every American who died, the Japanese lost 6 people, the Germans 11, and the Russians 92. — Andrew Roberts

Steel is the nation, went a Japanese saying. If the nation had a strong steel industry, then it would have a strong shipbuilding industry, and it would be a powerful, respectable nation again. Thus the efforts in the postwar years centered first and foremost on steel. The recovery did not come easily. At the end of the war only three of the nation's thirty-five blast furnaces were in operation, the others closed down as much from lack of raw material as from American bombs. The nation was poor, hard currency was limited, but the government poured much of its treasure into steel. By 1949 Japan had reached its prewar steel-production figures. — David Halberstam

American parents, teachers, and children were far more likely than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts to believe that mathematical ability is innate; if you have it, you don't have to work hard, and if you don't have it, there's no point in trying. In contrast, most Asians regard math success, like achievement in any other domain, as a matter of persistence and plain hard work. Of course you will make mistakes as you go along; that's how you learn and improve. It doesn't mean you are stupid. — Carol Tavris

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

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

As I watched him, he turned it curiously, then pressed a button on the side of the case. The crystal kitty head popped up to reveal a hidden compact mirror.
"I think it's you," I chirped.
Ben wheeled around and smiled approvingly. "I like it. Very Japanese."
"Thank you," I said. "I also got something for you."
"I'm not wearing a wig."
"You're such a downer." I handed him a baseball cap, then took off my camera case and slung it around his neck. "There: Generic American Tourist. No one will look twice at you."
"I'll choose not to take that as an insult. — Hilary Duff

In a way, 'Sin City's designed to be paced somewhere between an American comic book and Japanese manga. Working in black and white, I realized that the eye is less patient, and you have to make your point, and sometimes repeat it. Slowing things down is harder in black and white, because there isn't as much for the eye to enjoy. — Frank Miller

I didn't understand the American fascination with the Japanese schoolgirl. No, I don't think I can, really. — Chiaki Kuriyama

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

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

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

Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation. And — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The difference between the Japanese and the American is summed up in their opposite reactions to the proverb (popular in both nations), "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Epidemiologist S. Leonard Syme observes that to the Japanese, moss is exquisite and valued; a stone is enhanced by moss; hence a person who keeps moving and changing never acquires the beauty and benefits of stability. To Americans, the proverb is an admonition to keep rolling, to keep from being covered with clinging attachments. — Carol Tavris

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

There's always been a war inside me. The Japanese side and the American side can't be friends, but not because of their skin color, nor their culture. They just know nothing about each other. I clench my teeth. I don't want to think about this anymore, my kind is a mystery and there's no solving it. I — Lauren Nicolle Taylor

The importation and enslavement of millions of lack people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese American, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation, and were responded to with the expected obedience. — Stanley Milgram

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

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

film crew up there, enraptured by the charming rodents. The crew had come to shoot a documentary about the massacre; they had expected teen angst and American social Darwinism. They were seduced by the tranquillity - less than a hundred yards from the school. They shot hours of footage of the twelve-inch prairie dogs. The Japanese crew saw this place somewhat differently than Americans did. Their depiction was by turns tumultuous, brutal, explosive, and serene. — Dave Cullen

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

Some former POWs became almost feral with rage. For many men, seeing an Asian person or overhearing a snippet of Japanese left them shaking, weeping, enraged, or lost in flashbacks. One former POW, normally gentle and quiet, spat at every Asian person he saw. At Letterman General Hospital just after the war, four former POWs tried to attack a staffer who was of Japanese ancestry, not knowing that he was an American veteran. Troubled former POWs found nowhere to turn. — Laura Hillenbrand

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

America's new tea lovers are the people who have forced the tea trade to wake up. Elsewhere, tea has meant a certain way, a certain tradition, for centuries, but this is America! The American tea lover is heir to all the world's tea drinking traditions, from Japanese tea ceremonies to Russian samovars to English scones in the afternoon. India chai, China green, you name it and we can claim it and make it ours. And that's just what we are doing. In this respect, ours is the most innovative and exciting tea scene anywhere. — James Norwood Pratt

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

At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, like my father, were reluctant to talk about their experiences. — Cynthia Kadohata

But the Viet-Minh had had about ten months in which to establish their administration, train their forces with Japanese and American weapons (and Japanese and Chinese instructors), and kill or terrorize into submission the genuine Vietnamese nationalists who wanted a Viet-Nam independent from France but equally free of Communist rule. The first round of the war for Indochina already had been lost for the West before it had even begun. — Bernard B. Fall

Iacocca made his pitch: He wanted Ford to build the Fiesta, but with a Honda engine and transmission in it. Honda was delighted: He would like nothing better than this joint production with an American company, whose very name he revered. The price of the Japanese parts would be only $711. He could deliver 300,000 and do it quickly. Iacocca was even more delighted; he had an instant car and an unbeatable one at that. It could be in the dealers' showrooms in only eighteen months. — David Halberstam

London was a city of ghosts, some deader than others.
Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn't unlike any other major city - New York or Paris or Sydney - but he felt instinctively that London was ... at the extreme. The darker side of that history, as opposed to the parks, palaces and pearly kings' side that made busloads of Japanese and American tourists gawk and jabber. The hidden history of a city where the lonely, the dispossessed, the homeless, wandered the streets, brushing shoulders with the shadows of those that had come before them. A city in which the poor and the plague-ridden, those long-since hanged for stealing a loaf or murdered for a shilling, jostled for position with those seeking a meal, or a score, or a bed for the night.
A city where the dead could stay lost a long time — Mark Billingham

Japanese people today think of money, just money: Where is our national spirit today? The Jieitai must be the soul of Japan. ... The nation has no spiritual foundation. That is why you don't agree with me. You will just be American mercenaries. There you are in your tiny world. You do nothing for Japan. ... I salute the Emperor. Long live the emperor! — Yukio Mishima

Navajo infants get so attached to cradleboard that they cry to be tied into it. Kikuyu infants in Kenya get handed around several"mothers," all wives to one man ... Mothers in rural Guatemala keep their infants quiet, in dark huts. Middle-class American mothers talk a blue streak at them. Israeli kibbutz mothers give them over to a communal caretaker ... Japanese mothers sleep with them ... All these tactics are compatible with normal health
physical and mental
and development in infancy. So one lesson for parents so far seems to be: Let a hundred flowers bloom. — Melvin Konner

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

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

Our Navy was very largely sunk. And we were at war in no time at all. I share, in retrospect, the distress we all share at the internment of the Japanese American citizens of the United States. It was not our finest hour. But the Supreme Court had it before it at the time, and justified it and upheld it. — William A. Rusher

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

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

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

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

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

My CIA godfather told me he'd never heard any American speak Japanese so well. — Steven Seagal

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

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

The Japanese have two words: "uchi" meaning inside and "soto" meaning outside. Uchi refers to their close friends, the people in their inner circle. Soto refers to anyone who is outside that circle. And how they relate and communicate to the two are drastically different. To the soto, they are still polite and they might be outgoing, on the surface, but they will keep them far away, until they are considered considerate and trustworthy enough to slip their way into the uchi category. Once you are uchi, the Japanese version of friendship is entire universes beyond the average American friendship! Uchi friends are for life. Uchi friends represent a sacred duty. A Japanese friend, who has become an uchi friend, is the one who will come to your aid, in your time of need, when all your western "friends" have turned their back and walked away. — Alexei Maxim Russell

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

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

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

Because my parents were American missionaries who sent me to public schools in rural Japan, I had to confront Hiroshima as a child. I was in the fourth grade - the only American in my class - when our teacher wrote the words "America" and "Atomic Bomb" in white chalk on the blackboard. All forty Japanese children turned around to stare at me. My country had done something unforgivable and I had to take responsibility for it, all by myself. I desperately wanted to dig a hole under my desk, to escape my classmates' mute disbelief and never have to face them again. — Linda Hoaglund

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

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

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

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

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

But wars - or the threat of war - at least put an end to American chattel slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism. It is hard to think of any democracy - Afghan, American, Athenian, contemporary German, Iraqi, Italian, Japanese, ancient Theban - that was not an outcome of armed struggle and war. — Victor Davis Hanson

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

Listen--God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't.
~pages 286-287 — Haruki Murakami

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

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

Back then, when the culture was still building, people were loyal to stores, brands, and the cause. The style was retro-nineties, loud colors, vector or photographic driven, skinny jeans, selvage denim, lots of Japanese brands, and hip-hop/street culture content. There was also a political aspect to streetwear. Speaking for myself, I was sick of rocking logos for people. What people started printing their own shirts on AAA or American Apparel blanks, we got to rep the culture through the clothing. In the post-9/11 era, a lot of the more powerful messages about individuality, free speech, and what it was to be American manifested themselves in streetwear. (215) — Eddie Huang

Most American view World War II nostalgically as the "good war," in which the United States and its allies triumphed over German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism. The rest of the world remembers it as the bloodiest war in human history. By the time it was over, more than 60 million people lay dead, including 27 million Russians, between 10 million and 20 million Chinese, 6 million Jews, 5.5 million Germans, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 2.5 million Japanese, and 1.5 million Yugoslavs. Austria, Great Britain, France, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and the United States each counted between 250,000 and 333,000 dead. — Oliver Stone

Having completed its conquest of California in 1844, the United States looked across the Pacific for new business opportunities. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo (then called Edo) Bay with four men-of-war, and handed over a letter for the Japanese emperor from the American president which began with the ominous words, 'You know that the United States of America now extend from sea to sea.' Denied an audience with the emperor, Perry retreated with subtle threats to return with more firepower if the Japanese did not agree to open their ports to American trade. They refused. He did as he said; and the Japanese succumbed. — Pankaj Mishra

I'm not American. I still have my Japanese citizenship. — Masi Oka

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses - 120 war-horses - musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. "The whole of society," concludes the Japanese study, "was laid waste to its very foundations."2698 Lifton's history professor saw not even foundations left. "Such a weapon," he told the American psychiatrist, "has the power to make everything into nothing. — Richard Rhodes

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

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

Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them. — Roger Ebert

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

Some cultures, for instance, are collectivist; others are individualistic. Collectivist cultures, like Japan and other Confucian nations, value social harmony more than any one person's happiness. Individualistic cultures, like the United States, value personal satisfaction more than communal harmony. That's why the Japanese have a well-known expression: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." In America, the nail that sticks out gets a promotion or a shot at American Idol. We are a nation of protruding nails. — Eric Weiner

Then one of them asked why Japanese kids try to ape American kids? The clothes, the rap music, the skateboards, the hair. I wanted to say that it's not America they're aping, it's the Japan of their parents that they're rejecting. And since there's no home-grown counter culture, they just take hold of the nearest one to hand, which happens to be American. But it's not American culture exploiting us. It's us exploiting it. — David Mitchell