Japanese Death Quotes & Sayings

Chained inside the carriage is a sinful woman. When we set the carriage afire, her flesh will be roasted, her bones will be charred: she will die an agonizing death. Never again will you have such a perfect model for the screen. Do not fail to watch as her snow-white flesh erupts in flames. See and remember her long black hair dancing in a whirl of sparks! — Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Connections? I will tell you about connections . . . An amateur German physicist works in a patent office in Bern in Switzerland. He comes up with a theory that, half a century later, will lead to whole Japanese cities being destroyed, along with much of their population. Husbands, wives, sons, daughters. He does not want that connection to form, but that does not stop it forming.'
'You're talking about something very different.'
'No. No, I am not. This is a planet where a daydream can end in death, and where mathematicians can cause an apocalypse. That is my view of the humans. Is it any different from yours? — Matt Haig

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

I've deprived my family in order to buy books. No doubt there is a special punishment in hell for such self-indulgence. Perhaps I shall be struck with blindness among the rarest known to men. — I.J. Parker

There's an old Japanese proverb - to wait for luck is the same as waiting for one's death. We make our own luck, my old friend." "I — David Leadbeater

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a 'Great Leap Forward' that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.

In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous. — Robert Higgs

The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. — Kakuzo Okakura

I'll make you so in love with me, that everytime our lips touch, you'll die a little death. — Ai Yazawa

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time. — Anna Quindlen

[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living. — Sir Laurens Van Der Post

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. — Richard Flanagan

Welcome to thee,
O sword of eternity!
Through Buddha
And through Daruma alike
Thou hast cleft thy way. — Okakura Kakuzo

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

In the Japanese movie's they're throwing everything they have at him, every missile, but he keeps coming, he can't be stopped and that represents death. There's nothing you can do to stop it, to keep yourself from dying. You can try every trick in the book and it still won't prevent it. — Brad Warner

Maybe she'd seen too many Japanese horror movies, and maybe it was just a tingle of warning from generations of superstitious ancestors, but suddenly she knew that what Alyssa wanted was not to be saved, but for Shane to join her. In death. — Rachel Caine

The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts. — J.G. Ballard

If Nintendo had been an American company playing by the rules such companies follow, it would have given up long before there was any indication of success - that is, after Arakawa's original market surveys, when the AVS failed, or when there was resistance at the first trade shows. Many American companies are so wedded to market research that the devastating results of focus groups have signaled death knells. Had Nintendo been American, the company would probably have retreated when retailers in New York declined to place orders, or when it took more than a year for big sales numbers to appear. But commitment to an idea and pure tenacity are inherent in Japanese business philosophy - and certainly to Japanese business successes. — David Sheff

This world-
To what may I liken it?
To autumn fields
lit dimly in the dusk
by lightning flashes. — Yu Minamoto

We must learn to live with danger, " he now said to Kino.
"Do you mean the ocean and the volcano cannot hurt us if we are not afraid?" Kino asked.
"No," his father replied. "I did not say that. Ocean is there and volcano is there. It is true that on any day ocean may rise into storm and volcano may burst into flame. We must accept this fact, but without fear. We must say, 'Someday I shall die, and does it matter whether it is by ocean or volcano, or whether I grow old and weak?' "
"I don't want to think about such things," Kino said.
"it is right for you not to think about them," his father said. "Then do not be afraid. When you are afraid, you are thinking about them all the time. Enjoy life and don not fear death - that is the way of a good Japanese. — Pearl S. Buck

Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning. — Tsunetomo Yamamoto

To live in the midst of danger is to know how good life is," his father replied.
"But if we are lost in the danger?" Kino asked anxiously.
"To live in the presence of death makes us brave and strong," Kino's father replied. "That is why our people never fear death. We see it too often and we do not fear it. To die a little later or a little sooner does not matter. But to live bravely, to lobe life, to see how beautiful the trees are and the mountains, yes, even the sea, to enjoy work because it produces food for life - in these things we Japanese are a fortunate people. We love life because we live in danger. We do not fear death because we understand that life and death are necessary to each other."
"What is death?" Kino asked.
"Death is the great gateway," Kino's father said. — Pearl S. Buck

... Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning - something different from what he had before, at least a different world. — Yukio Mishima

A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. p136 — Donna Tartt

(While interviewing The University Student
'Oh, poor Xinran. You haven't even got the various categories of women straight. How can you possibly hope to understand men? Let me tell you. When men have been drinking, they come out with a set of definitions for women. Lovers are "swordfish", tasty but with sharp bones. "Personal secretaries" are "carp", the longer you "stew" them, the more flavour they have. Other men's wives are "Japanese puffer fish", trying a mouthful could be the end of you, but risking death is a source of pride.'
'And what about their own wives?'
'Salt cod, because it keeps for a long time. When there is no other food, salt cod is cheap and convenient. — Xinran

The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II. — Steven Spielberg

Gingerly, Daniel reached toward the infant. "What if she doesn't like me?"

"She'll spit acid in your eye and you'll die a horrible death," Kara joked. — Jacqueline Diamond

He had been inspired to start a career in the porn industry after reading the incredible tale of a Japanese man who avenged the death of his sister by going down on her best friend for seven days and seven nights. — Mark Jackman

People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. — David Mitchell

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

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

Shamefully, all of us have wanted revenge on someone at some point for something. I've lived since before man and buffalo roamed this small planet. I have survived the beginning, bloom, and death of countless enemies, civilizations, and people. And the one truth I have learned most during all of these centuries is the old Japanese proverb. If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. — Winston S. Churchill

We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo - men, women and children. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win? — Robert McNamara

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. — Roland Barthes