Japanese Success Quotes

Zen is a present state of mind where one honors the task they are partaking of, even if the task is sitting still and doing nothing. Zen is engrained in the Japanese way of life. You can see it everywhere: when a sushi chef delicately slices a piece of raw fish, when a retired man watches an autumn leaf fall from a tree in the park, when a mother prepares and places a cup of tea before her child. When actions and thoughts are done with mindfulness, being fully present in the moment, the person performing the action or thought gives honor to the food, an idea, a task, a person, etc.

No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.

An obstacle which would frighten discreet men is nothing to determined women. They dare what men avoid, and sometimes they achieve an unusual success.

We only have one life to live. Since everybody has the potential to be successful, I hope we'll all take an action and actually live it.

Fall down seven times. Stand up eight. JAPANESE PROVERB

Human ambitions are like Japanese carp; they grow proportional to the size of their environment. Our achievements grow according to the size of our dreams and the degree to which we are in touch with our mission.

I think part of your success lies in the shock of recognition- or as the Japanese might say, 'the unexpected recognition of the faithful "suchness" of very ordinary things'.

Success is 90 percent dependent on our mind-set.

The simple recipe for success that Mendel had instilled in his children from the cradle on consisted in never complaining, never asking for anything, striving to be the best in everything you do, and never trusting anyone. Alma had to carry this heavy weight on her back for several decades, until love helped her shed some of it. Her stoic attitude contributed to the air of mystery surrounding her, long before she had any secrets to keep.

lies. The ultimate secret of success is this: If you tidy up in one shot, rather than little by little, you can dramatically change your mind-set.

Any criticism at all which depresses you to the extent that you feel you cannot ever write anything worth anything is from the Devil and to subject yourself to it is for you an occasion of sin. In you the talent is there and you are expected to use it. Whether the work itself is completely successful, or whether you ever get any worldly success out of it, is a matter of no concern to you. It is like the Japanese swordsmen who are indifferent to getting slain in the duel.

A lesson in bringing about true changes of mind and heart comes from a Japanese functionary. By day, he crunched numbers that showed his country was approaching imminent energy crisis and helped to craft policy. By night, he weaved a novel in which a bureaucrat-hero helps see the country through to new energy sources. When the crisis came faster than he expected, he actually put the novel away because he did not want to make the burden of his countrymen worse. When the short-term crisis passed, he published his novel. It's phenomenal and well-timed success fueled the vision that inspired difficult change and maintained a sense of urgency.

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.

Dinner that night is a feast of flavor. To celebrate the successful exorcism, Kagura has cooked several more dishes than the shrine's usual, simple fare- fragrant onigiri, balls of rice soaked in green tea, with umeboshi- salty and pickled plums- as filling. There is eggplant simmered in clear soup, green beans in sesame sause, and burdock in sweet-and-sour dressing. The mood is festive.

there’s an accumulation of technical know-how, so short of some grievous error nothing’s ever totally ruined. But you can’t stockpile vision and creativity—they’re more perishable, like fresh fruit. Making it big is no guarantee of success. There have been lots of companies that made it big, only to disappear.

A firm may achieve differentiation, yet this differentiation will usually sustain only so much of a price differential. Thus if a differentiated firm gets too far behind in cost due to technological change or simply inattention, the low cost firm may be in a position to make major inroads. For example, Kawasaki and other Japanese motorcycle producers have been able to successfully attack differentiated producers such as Harley-Davidson and Triumph in large motorcycles by offering major cost savings to buyers.

There is a Japanese proverb that describes my formula for success: “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” You

The school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long.

The simple recipe for success that Mendel had instilled in his children from the cradle on consisted in never complaining, never asking for anything, striving to be the best in everything you do, and never trusting anyone.

To help cement the friendship between Japan and Disney, Emperor Hirohito personally presented to Roy O. Disney, for the dedication of the Magic Kingdom, a stone Japanese lantern known as a Toro to light the way to success and happiness.

The first Japanese strike in the Pacific War was not against America at Pearl Harbor. It was against British Malaya. About 90mn before Pearl Harbor, some 5k Japanese troops successfully attacked a British force in Kota Bharu, in the Kelantan Sultanate.

successfully. ‘Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide’ (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had not unsuccessfully developed a gallium arsenide chip, but also unnecessary. Delete successfully.

Women were also less demanding than men when it came to my clowning. When I played the jester men did not go on laughing indefinitely. I knew that if I got carried away by my success in entertaining a man and overdid the role, my comedy would fall flat, and I was always careful to quit at a suitable place. Women, on the other hand, have no sense of moderation. No matter how long I went on with my antics they would ask for more, and I would become exhausted responding to their insatiable demands for encores. They really laugh an amazing amount of the time. I suppose one can say that women stuff themselves with far more pleasures than men.

There’s a cure for aging that no one talks about. It’s called learning. In my mind, as long as you learn something new each day, stretch your personal frontiers and improve the way you think, you cannot grow old. Aging only happens to people who lose their lust for getting better and disconnect from their natural base of curiosity. “Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject but they are enough to understand it. So for more than 60 years I have kept studying one subject at a time,” said Peter Drucker, the father of modern management who lived

In 1960, he visited Tokyo, where reporters greeted him at the airport with a barrage of questions. “I do not regret,” he said softly, “that I had something to do with the technical success of the atomic bomb. It isn’t that I don’t feel bad; it is that I don’t feel worse tonight than I did last night.” The translation of that ambiguously loaded sentiment into Japanese could not have been easy.

One might say that Japanese faith developed as negative space around the forbidden faith of Christianity. So while the Tokugawa era successfully purged Christians from Japan, an unanticipated outcome was that in banning Christianity they created an imprint of it, a negative space within culture. In a culture that honors the hidden, the weak and the unspoken, Christianity became a hidden reality of Japanese culture.

Judged in terms of its own aspirations, the Communist regime was a monumental failure; it succeeded in one thing only - staying in power. But since for Bolsheviks power was not an end in itself but means to en end, its mere retention does not qualify the experiment as a success. The Bolsheviks made no secret of their aims: toppling everywhere regimes based on private property and replacing them with a worldwide union of socialist societies. They succeeded nowhere outside the boundaries of what had been the Russian Empire in spreading their regime until the end of World War II, when the Red Army stepped into the vacuum created in Eastern Europe by the surrender of Germany, the Chinese Communists seized control of their country from the Japanese, and Communist dictatorships, aided by Moscow, established themselves in a number of recently emancipated colonial areas.

Management guru Stephen Covey tells this old Japanese tale about a samurai warrior and his three sons: The samurai wanted to teach his sons about the power of teamwork. So he gave each of them an arrow and asked them to break it. No problem. Each son did it easily. Then the samurai gave them a bundle of three arrows bound together and asked them to repeat the process. But none of them could. “That’s your lesson,” the samurai said. “If you three stick together, you will never be defeated.

If he hadn’t become a Buddhist monk, Sawaki Roshi would have been successful in a worldly sense in business, politics, or the military. Instead, he devoted his life to wholeheartedly practicing Dogen Zenji’s just sitting, or shikantaza, which according to him was good for nothing. For him, social climbing in pursuit of fame and profit was meaningless. The Japanese expression for “waste” is bonifuru, which means “sacrifice,” “lose all,” or “ruin.” So when we say he wasted his life, we use the expression in a paradoxical way—like saying that zazen is good for nothing.

Perhaps the best example for the continuing power and importance of traditional religions in the modern world comes from Japan. In 1853 an American fleet forced Japan to open itself to the modern world. In response, the Japanese state embarked on a rapid and extremely successful process of modernisation. Within a few decades, it became a powerful bureaucratic state relying on science, capitalism and the latest military technology to defeat China and Russia, occupy Taiwan and Korea, and ultimately sink the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and destroy the European empires in the Far East. Yet Japan did not copy blindly the Western blueprint. It was fiercely determined to protect its unique identity, and to ensure that modern Japanese will be loyal to Japan rather than to science, to modernity, or to some nebulous global community. To that end, Japan upheld the native religion of Shinto as the cornerstone of Japanese identity. In truth, the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodge-podge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favourite spirits and local customs. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Japanese state created an official version of Shinto, while discouraging many local traditions. This ‘State Shinto’ was fused with very modern ideas of nationality and race, which the Japanese elite picked from the European imperialists. Any element in Buddhism, Confucianism and the samurai feudal ethos that could be helpful in cementing loyalty to the state was added to the mix. To top it all, State Shinto enshrined as its supreme principle the worship of the Japanese emperor, who was considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and himself no less than a living god.

Giant hogweed is considered extremely dangerous because its sap, in combination with ultraviolet light, can burn human skin. Every year, millions are spent digging up plants and destroying them, without any great success. However, hogweed can spread only because the original forested meadows along the banks of rivers and streams no longer exist. If these forests were to return, it would be so dark under the forest canopy that hogweed would disappear. The same goes for Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed, which also grow on the riverbanks in the absence of the forests. Trees could solve the problem if people trying to improve things would only allow them to take over.

There are a dozen factors that make Japanese food so special- ingredient obsession, technical precision, thousands of years of meticulous refinement- but chief among them is one simple concept: specialization. In the Western world, where miso-braised short ribs share menu space with white truffle ceviche, restaurants cast massive nets to try to catch as many fish as possible, but in Japan, the secret to success is choosing one thing and doing it fucking well. Forever. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to grilling beef intestines, slicing blowfish, kneading buckwheat into tangles of chewy noodles- microdisciplines with infinite room for improvement. The concept of shokunin, an artisan deeply and singularly dedicated to his or her craft, is at the core of Japanese culture.

Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key to realising their disparate goals. Thus in 2014 the devout Hindu Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India thanks largely to his success in boosting economic growth in his home state of Gujarat, and to the widely held view that only he could reinvigorate the sluggish national economy. Analogous views have kept the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in power in Turkey since 2003. The name of his party – the Justice and Development Party – highlights its commitment to economic development, and the Erdoğan government has indeed managed to maintain impressive growth rates for more than a decade.

By 1957, a mere eleven years after its devastation, Japan not only had the most modern steel mills in the world but was the foremost steel producer in the world. But that was just the beginning: In the decade following 1957, Japanese steel production grew by 170 percent—while the American steel industry grew only 20 percent. The American steel industry, believing itself invulnerable, was headed by a complacent and insular management which was slow to bring in modern technology and which, even as the challenger grew more proficient, locked the industry into ever costlier labor agreements. By 1964, 28 percent of Japan’s steel exports was going to America. In Japan, a thrust in shipbuilding followed closely upon the success in steel; by 1956 Japan had replaced Britain as the world’s leading shipbuilding nation.

Retrospectively, American statesmen realized the rashness of their oil embargo. As the later secretary of state Dean Acheson put it, America’s misreading of Japanese intentions was not of “what the Japanese government proposed to do in Asia, not of the hostility our embargo would excite, but of the incredibly high risks General Tojo would assume to accomplish his ends. No one in Washington realized that he and his regime regarded the conquest of Asia not as the accomplishment of an ambition but as the survival of a regime. It was a life-and-death matter to them.”146 Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was a partial success in the short term, and Japan went on to enjoy great tactical victories against America and Britain, but the conflict eventually led to its almost total destruction by 1945. Its wars in East Asia cost tens of millions of lives.

Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key to realising their disparate goals. Thus in 2014 the devout Hindu Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India thanks largely to his success in boosting economic growth in his home state of Gujarat, and to the widely held view that only he could reinvigorate the sluggish national economy. Analogous views have kept the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in power in Turkey since 2003. The name of his party – the Justice and Development Party – highlights its commitment to economic development, and the Erdoğan government has indeed managed to maintain impressive growth rates for more than a decade. Japan’s prime minister, the nationalist Shinzō Abe, came to office in 2012 pledging to jolt the Japanese economy out of two decades of stagnation. His aggressive and somewhat unusual measures to achieve this have been nicknamed Abenomics. Meanwhile in neighbouring China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do whatever it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city-state, they pursue this line of thinking even further, and peg ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, government ministers get a raise, as if that is what their jobs are all about.2

Perhaps the best example for the continuing power and importance of traditional religions in the modern world comes from Japan. In 1853 an American fleet forced Japan to open itself to the modern world. In response, the Japanese state embarked on a rapid and extremely successful process of modernisation. Within a few decades, it became a powerful bureaucratic state relying on science, capitalism and the latest military technology to defeat China and Russia, occupy Taiwan and Korea, and ultimately sink the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and destroy the European empires in the Far East. Yet Japan did not copy blindly the Western blueprint. It was fiercely determined to protect its unique identity, and to ensure that modern Japanese will be loyal to “Japan rather than to science, to modernity, or to some nebulous global community. To that end, Japan upheld the native religion of Shinto as the cornerstone of Japanese identity. In truth, the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodge-podge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favourite spirits and local customs. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Japanese state created an official version of Shinto, while discouraging many local traditions. This ‘State Shinto’ was fused with very modern ideas of nationality and race, which the Japanese elite picked from the European imperialists. Any element in Buddhism, Confucianism and the samurai feudal ethos that could be helpful in cementing loyalty to the state was added to the mix. To top it all, State Shinto enshrined as its supreme principle the worship of the Japanese emperor, who was considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and himself no less than a living god.

In North America, there is no nostalgia for the postwar period, quite simply because the Trente Glorieuses never existed there: per capita output grew at roughly the same rate of 1.5–2 percent per year throughout the period 1820–2012. To be sure, growth slowed a bit between 1930 and 1950 to just over 1.5 percent, then increased again to just over 2 percent between 1950 and 1970, and then slowed to less than 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012. In Western Europe, which suffered much more from the two world wars, the variations are considerably greater: per capita output stagnated between 1913 and 1950 (with a growth rate of just over 0.5 percent) and then leapt ahead to more than 4 percent from 1950 to 1970, before falling sharply to just slightly above US levels (a little more than 2 percent) in the period 1970–1990 and to barely 1.5 percent between 1990 and 2012. Western Europe experienced a golden age of growth between 1950 and 1970, only to see its growth rate diminish to one-half or even one-third of its peak level during the decades that followed. [...] If we looked only at continental Europe, we would find an average per capita output growth rate of 5 percent between 1950 and 1970—a level well beyond that achieved in other advanced countries over the past two centuries. These very different collective experiences of growth in the twentieth century largely explain why public opinion in different countries varies so widely in regard to commercial and financial globalization and indeed to capitalism in general. In continental Europe and especially France, people quite naturally continue to look on the first three postwar decades—a period of strong state intervention in the economy—as a period blessed with rapid growth, and many regard the liberalization of the economy that began around 1980 as the cause of a slowdown. In Great Britain and the United States, postwar history is interpreted quite differently. Between 1950 and 1980, the gap between the English-speaking countries and the countries that had lost the war closed rapidly. By the late 1970s, US magazine covers often denounced the decline of the United States and the success of German and Japanese industry. In Britain, GDP per capita fell below the level of Germany, France, Japan, and even Italy. It may even be the case that this sense of being rivaled (or even overtaken in the case of Britain) played an important part in the “conservative revolution.” Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States promised to “roll back the welfare state” that had allegedly sapped the animal spirits of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs and thus to return to pure nineteenth-century capitalism, which would allow the United States and Britain to regain the upper hand. Even today, many people in both countries believe that the conservative revolution was remarkably successful, because their growth rates once again matched continental European and Japanese levels. In fact, neither the economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state interventionism that began in 1945 deserves such praise or blame. France, Germany, and Japan would very likely have caught up with Britain and the United States following their collapse of 1914–1945 regardless of what policies they had adopted (I say this with only slight exaggeration). The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm. Similarly, once these countries had attained the global technological frontier, it is hardly surprising that they ceased to grow more rapidly than Britain and the United States or that growth rates in all of these wealthy countries more or less equalized [...] Broadly speaking, the US and British policies of economic liberalization appear to have had little effect on this simple reality, since they neither increased growth nor decreased it.

… this Japanese classic,Ikuru, which, you know, I had loved for most of my life, you know, I think I first saw it when I was a boy, on British TV and it had a huge impact on me, partly because of my Japanese background but I think quite regardless of that… and I thought – I mean, bit of an exaggeration – I think I always kind of lived my life informed by the message in that film as I was growing up. Ikuru is an untypical film of [Kurosawa’s] in many ways. It’s a quiet, personal film, set in what was then the present day. No gangsters or anything like this you know. It’s the story about this civil servant, aging civil servant… whose life has been kind of… semi-lived – if at all. But when he learns that he is terminally ill, he suddenly… it becomes very urgent for him this question, ‘How do I make my life worthwhile?’ Now what really appealed to me about this film... was I thought it said something new and different… You can actually, you can make your life meaningful and triumphant… without having to do anything that’s going to earn you headlines in the newspaper or earn you great applause, you know? You have to locate that sense of… you have to find a very lonely sense of success and failure. And you have to locate that sense of success… you have to be strong enough to locate that sense of success somewhere very private and secret within yourself. But nevertheless it can be absolutely redeeming and fulfilling, if you can find it, you know. And I think it’s a very important message.

… this Japanese classic, Ikuru, which, you know, I had loved for most of my life, you know, I think I first saw it when I was a boy, on British TV and it had a huge impact on me, partly because of my Japanese background but I think quite regardless of that… and I thought – I mean, bit of an exaggeration – I think I always kind of lived my life informed by the message in that film as I was growing up. Ikuru is an untypical film of [Kurosawa’s] in many ways. It’s a quiet, personal film, set in what was then the present day. No gangsters or anything like this you know. It’s the story about this civil servant, aging civil servant… whose life has been kind of… semi-lived – if at all. But when he learns that he is terminally ill, he suddenly… it becomes very urgent for him this question, ‘How do I make my life worthwhile?’ Now what really appealed to me about this film... was I thought it said something new and different… You can actually, you can make your life meaningful and triumphant… without having to do anything that’s going to earn you headlines in the newspaper or earn you great applause, you know? You have to locate that sense of… you have to find a very lonely sense of success and failure. And you have to locate that sense of success… you have to be strong enough to locate that sense of success somewhere very private and secret within yourself. But nevertheless it can be absolutely redeeming and fulfilling, if you can find it, you know. And I think it’s a very important message.

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

went to her workshop three times a week to paint with Kirsten. She rarely frequented the Lark House dining room, preferring to eat out at local restaurants where the owners knew her, or in her apartment, when her daughter-in-law sent the chauffeur around with one of her favorite dishes. Irina kept only basic necessities in her kitchen: fresh fruit, oatmeal, whole-grain bread, honey. Alma and Seth often invited Irina to their ritual Sunday lunch at Sea Cliff, where the family paid the matriarch homage. To Seth, who had previously used any pretext not to arrive before dessert—for even he was unable to consider not putting in an appearance at all—Irina’s presence made the occasion infinitely more appealing. He was still stubbornly pursuing her, but since he was meeting with little success he also went out with previous girlfriends willing to put up with his fickleness. He was bored with them and did not succeed in making Irina jealous. As his grandmother often said and the family often repeated, why waste ammunition on vultures? It was yet another enigmatic saying often used by the Belascos. To Alma, these family reunions began with a pleasant sense of anticipation at seeing her loved ones, particularly her granddaughter, Pauline (she saw Seth frequently enough), but often ended up being a bore, since every topic of conversation became a pretext for getting angry, not from any lack of affection, but out of the bad habit of arguing over trivialities. Seth always looked for ways to challenge or scandalize his parents; Pauline brought to the table yet another cause she had embraced, which she explained in great detail, from genital mutilation to animal slaughterhouses; Doris took great pains to offer her most exquisite culinary experiments, which were veritable banquets, yet regularly ended up weeping in her room because nobody appreciated them; good old Larry meanwhile performed a constant balancing act to avoid quarrels. The grandmother took advantage of Irina to dissipate tension, because the Belascos always behaved in a civilized fashion in front of strangers, even if it was only a humble employee from

the military-industrial-scientific complex, because today’s wars are scientific productions. The world’s military forces initiate, fund and steer a large part of humanity’s scientific research and technological development. When World War One bogged down into interminable trench warfare, both sides called in the scientists to break the deadlock and save the nation. The men in white answered the call, and out of the laboratories rolled a constant stream of new wonder-weapons: combat aircraft, poison gas, tanks, submarines and ever more efficient machine guns, artillery pieces, rifles and bombs. 33. German V-2 rocket ready to launch. It didn’t defeat the Allies, but it kept the Germans hoping for a technological miracle until the very last days of the war. {© Ria Novosti/Science Photo Library.} Science played an even larger role in World War Two. By late 1944 Germany was losing the war and defeat was imminent. A year earlier, the Germans’ allies, the Italians, had toppled Mussolini and surrendered to the Allies. But Germany kept fighting on, even though the British, American and Soviet armies were closing in. One reason German soldiers and civilians thought not all was lost was that they believed German scientists were about to turn the tide with so-called miracle weapons such as the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft. While the Germans were working on rockets and jets, the American Manhattan Project successfully developed atomic bombs. By the time the bomb was ready, in early August 1945, Germany had already surrendered, but Japan was fighting on. American forces were poised to invade its home islands. The Japanese vowed to resist the invasion and fight to the death, and there was every reason to believe that it was no idle threat. American generals told President Harry S. Truman that an invasion of Japan would cost the lives of a million American soldiers and would extend the war well into 1946. Truman decided to use the new bomb. Two weeks and two atom bombs later, Japan surrendered unconditionally and the war was over. But science is not just about offensive weapons. It plays a major role in our defences as well. Today many Americans believe that the solution to terrorism is technological rather than political. Just give millions more to the nanotechnology industry, they believe, and the United States could send bionic spy-flies into every Afghan cave, Yemenite redoubt and North African encampment. Once that’s done, Osama Bin Laden’s heirs will not be able to make a cup of coffee without a CIA spy-fly passing this vital information back to headquarters in Langley.

Although he always talked about technology and Oracle with passion and intensity, he didn’t have the methodical relentlessness that made Bill Gates so formidable and feared. By his own admission, Ellison was not an obsessive grinder like Gates: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.” Ellison had a reputation for being easily bored by the process of running a business and often took time off, leaving the shop to senior colleagues. One of the reasons often trotted out for Oracle’s success in the 1990s was Ellison’s decision to hire Ray Lane, a senior executive credited with bringing order and discipline to the business, allowing Ellison just to do the vision thing and bunk off to sail his boats whenever he felt like it. But Lane had left Oracle nearly eighteen months before after falling out with Ellison. Since then, Ellison had taken full control of the company—how likely was it that he would he stay the course? One reason to be skeptical was that Ellison just seemed to have too many things going on in his life besides Oracle. During the afternoon, we took a break from discussing the future of computing to take a tour of what would be his new home—nearly a decade in the making, and at that time, still nearly three years from completion. In the hills of Woodside, California, framing a five-acre artificial lake, six wooden Japanese houses, perfect replicas of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century originals in Kyoto, were under construction. The site also contained two full-size ornamental bridges, hundreds of boulders trucked in from the high Sierras and arranged according to Zen principles and an equal number of cherry trees jostling for attention next to towering redwoods. Ellison remarked: “If I’m remembered for anything, it’s more likely to be for this than Oracle.”3 In the evening, I noticed in Ellison’s dining room a scale model of what would become his second home: a graceful-looking 450-foot motor-yacht capable of circumnavigating the globe. Already the owner of two mega-yachts, bought secondhand and extensively modified (the 192-foot Ronin based in Sausalito and the 244-foot Katana, which was kept at Antibes in the South of France), Ellison wanted to create the perfect yacht. The key to achieving this had been his successful courtship of a seventy-two-year-old Englishman, Jon Bannenberg, recognized as the greatest designer of very big, privately-owned yachts. With a budget of $200 million—about the same as that for the Japanese imperial village in Woodside—it would be Bannenberg’s masterpiece. Bannenberg had committed himself to “handing over the keys” to Ellison in time for his summer holiday in 2003.

So Japan is allied with Germany and they’re like “Sweet the rest of the world already hates us let’s take their land!” So they start invading China and Malaysia and the Philippines and just whatever else but then they’re like “Hmm what if America tries to stop us? Ooh! Let’s surprise attack Hawaii!” So that’s exactly what they do. The attack is very successful but only in a strictly technical sense. To put it in perspective, let’s try a metaphor. Let’s say you’re having a barbecue but you don’t want to get stung by any bees so you find your local beehive and just go crazy on it with a baseball bat. Make sense? THEN YOU MUST BE JAPAN IN THE ’40s. WHO ELSE WOULD EVER DO THIS? So the U.S. swarms on Japan, obviously but that’s where our bee metaphor breaks down because while bees can sting you they cannot put you in concentration camps (or at least, I haven’t met any bees that can do that). Yeah, after that surprise attack on Pearl Harbor everybody on the West Coast is like “OMG WE’RE AT WAR WITH JAPAN AND THERE ARE JAPANESE DUDES LIVING ALLLL AROUND US.” I mean, they already banned Japanese immigration like a decade before but there are still Japanese dudes all over the coast and what’s more those Japanese dudes are living right next door to all the important aircraft factories and landing strips and shipyards and farmland and forests and bridges almost as if those types of things are EVERYWHERE and thus impossible not to live next door to. Whatever, it’s pretty suspicious. Now, at this point, nothing has been sabotaged and some people think that means they’re safe. But not military geniuses like Earl Warren who points out that the only reason there’s been no sabotage is that the Japanese are waiting for their moment and the fact that there has been no sabotage yet is ALL THE PROOF WE NEED to determine that sabotage is being planned. Frank Roosevelt hears this and he’s like “That’s some pretty shaky logic but I really don’t like Japanese people. Okay, go ahead.” So he passes an executive order that just says “Any enemy ex-patriots can be kicked out of any war zone I designate. P.S.: California, Oregon, and Washington are war zones have fun with that.” So they kick all the Japanese off the coast forcing them to sell everything they own but people are still not satisfied. They’re like “Those guys look funny! We can’t have funny-looking dudes roaming around this is wartime! We gotta lock ’em up.” And FDR is like “Okay, sure.” So they herd all the Japanese into big camps where they are concentrated in large numbers like a hundred and ten thousand people total and then the military is like “Okay, guys we will let you go if you fill out this loyalty questionnaire that says you love the United States and are totally down to be in our army” and some dudes are like “Sweet, free release!” but some dudes are like “Seriously? You just put me in jail for being Asian. This country is just one giant asshole and it’s squatting directly over my head.” And the military is like “Ooh, sorry to hear that buddy looks like you’re gonna stay here for the whole war. Meanwhile your friends get to go fight and die FOR FREEDOM.

In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, aerospace, consumer electronics, and automobiles, where they are far ahead of most Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies. Unlike Southeast Asia, the Koreans have moved into these sectors not primarily through joint ventures where the foreign partner has provided a turnkey assembly plant but through their own indigenous organizations. So successful have the Koreans been that many Japanese companies feel relentlessly dogged by Korean competitors in areas like semiconductors and steel. The chief advantage that large-scale chaebol organizations would appear to provide is the ability of the group to enter new industries and to ramp up to efficient production quickly through the exploitation of economies of scope.70 Does this mean, then, that cultural factors like social capital and spontaneous sociability are not, in the end, all that important, since a state can intervene to fill the gap left by culture? The answer is no, for several reasons. In the first place, not every state is culturally competent to run as effective an industrial policy as Korea is. The massive subsidies and benefits handed out to Korean corporations over the years could instead have led to enormous abuse, corruption, and misallocation of investment funds. Had President Park and his economic bureaucrats been subject to political pressures to do what was expedient rather than what they believed was economically beneficial, if they had not been as export oriented, or if they had simply been more consumption oriented and corrupt, Korea today would probably look much more like the Philippines. The Korean economic and political scene was in fact closer to that of the Philippines under Syngman Rhee in the 1950s. Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically. He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led to disaster. There are other economic drawbacks to state promotion of large-scale industry. The most common critique made by market-oriented economists is that because the investment was government rather than market driven, South Korea has acquired a series of white elephant industries such as shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and heavy manufacturing. In an age that rewards downsizing and nimbleness, the Koreans have created a series of centralized and inflexible corporations that will gradually lose their low-wage competitive edge. Some cite Taiwan’s somewhat higher overall rate of economic growth in the postwar period as evidence of the superior efficiency of a smaller, more competitive industrial structure.

Samsung, “They did market research and came up with good news: nobody had heard of Samsung.” So the name stayed, even as they reinvented themselves, in what has become a textbook case of successful rebranding strategy. Samsung (which means “three stars”) began in 1938 as a Korean-owned fruit and fish company, during the period of Japanese rule.

with local administration. These ladies are often very attractive, and are not seldom introduced at Court and enjoy high favor." "And successes depend

I didn’t realize until I was an adult that most of my poor childhood friends were Asian American or Pacific Islanders. My idea of Asian Americans very much fit in with the popular stereotype of hard-working, financially and academically successful, quiet, serious people of predominantly East Asian (Chinese, Korean, or Japanese) descent. But most of my friends’ parents were from Guam, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and India. Most of my friends’ parents had fled war, conflict, and economic disaster. They were all poor, they were all struggling, and they were all discriminated against for their brown skin and their strong accents. But even though they were my friends, their racial and ethnic identity was invisible to me and continued to be so well into my adulthood.

So, Rachel, what do you want to get?" he asks, even though we still haven't opened the menu. I throw open the cover and quickly scan my choices. I am hungry for everything. I want to taste their teriyaki sauce and see how they've worked yuzu into a salad dressing and sample their tempura batter. I want to sit up at the sushi bar and chat with the chef about different fillets of raw fish. And I want to be on a date with a guy who wants to hear the chef's answers too. Still, Rob Zuckerman is nice, and he's obviously smart and successful, and he has a full head of brown hair (one cannot discount that full head of hair). So I close my menu and ask him to suggest a few things since he has obviously been here before. "Why don't we start with a bowl of edamame and an order of tatsuta-age chicken?" "I made that this week," I exclaim, excited that he'd pick that off the menu since I was eyeing it. "I'm learning how to cook and it's actually really easy. You just marinate the chicken and then coat it in potato starch before you fry it." I notice that Rob is staring at me as if I've just started reciting the recipe in Japanese. "I can't believe I've ordered it all these years when I could make it at home.

As long as Toyota is continually identifying “anomalies” in the manufacturing process, every single defect is seen as an opportunity to make the process better. There are, in effect, a set of rules that ensure that this happens. For example, an employee must never add value to a part until it is ready to be used in the next step of adding value. It must be done in the same way, every time. That way managers know, definitely, that the value-adding step worked with the next step in the process. That creates an environment of repeated scientific experimentation. Each time it’s done the same way constitutes a test of whether doing it that way, to those specifications, will result in perfection every time. For Toyota, the theory was embodied in the set of processes they developed to lead to defect-free manufacturing. Each activity can be seen as an individual if-then statement: “If we do this, then that will be the result.” Through this theory of manufacturing, the quality movement was born. As a consequence, the Americans took what they’d learned from their Japanese competitors to heart and the US automobile industry today churns out very reliable cars. Innovation, in a very real sense, exists in a “pre–quality revolution” state. 1 Managers accept flaws, missteps, and failure as an inevitable part of the process of innovation. They have become so accustomed to putting Band-Aids on their uneven innovation success that too often they give no real thought to what’s causing it in the first place.

within three years of its founding, OverDrive had loaned one million books, and in 2012, it had reached a hundred million checkouts. By the end of 2017, it had reached the milestone of having loaned one billion books. On an average day, seven hundred thousand books are checked out through OverDrive. The company has been so successful that, a few years ago, the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten paid $410 million to acquire it.

To summarize, the secret of success is to tidy in one shot, as quickly and completely as possible, and to start by discarding.

But the accompanying steamed rice, pressed into the shape of a chrysanthemum, had a clean, delicate sweetness unlike any rice I had ever tasted. The tray also held a plastic bowl and sipped the savory liquid enriched with diced tofu and emerald wisps of wakame seaweed. In a shallow dish sat a small block of bean curd splashed with soy sauce and topped with pinkish curls of dried bonito that looked like pencil shavings. I cut into the silky white cube and tried to balance the craggy chunk on the slender pieces of wood. It tumbled off. After trying again, success was rewarded with the sweet taste of milky custard mingled with dark soy and smoky fish flakes. There were pickles too, crisp neon-yellow half-moons of sweet daikon radish and crunchy slices of eggplant. Although I had not expected culinary brilliance from a mall restaurant, dinner was exceeding expectations. The ingredients were plain, but exceptional in their purity and freshness.

I had made a sort of Japanese antipasto to accompany a bottle of French Bordeaux I had bought in the food hall of Daimaru department store. So while John sat on a blue cotton cushion hunched over the low unfinished wooden table sipping red wine from a small glass tumbler, I presented him with a succession of nibbles: chili-speckled rice crackers and peanuts; boiled edamame tossed with coarse salt; chewy strands of dried calamari; and chilled steamed asparagus that I had bought fresh that morning at Nishiki market. For a taste of home, I sautéed pudgy slices of herb-flavored wheat gluten, soft as gnocchi, in garlic butter with sliced shiitake mushrooms. Dinner ended with snappy red grapes and imported coconut sables that broke into buttery splinters in our cupped palms.

Influential scholars since the mid-twentieth century have argued that the essential character of Ottoman modernity was reactive, imitative, defensive, and ultimately defective relative to the presumably more successful modernization projects of Germany, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and America, where while exemplifying and eventually monopolizing claims to modernity, also brought two world wars, the Holocaust, the nuclear immolation of Japanese cities, and the Cold War, among other worldwide cataclysms.

while quietly purchasing land in the names of their American children, who would legally cultivate the plots upon turning twenty-one. But in 1923 an amendment passed, in the wake of the devastating 1922 Supreme Court decision denying issei citizenship, which eliminated this loophole. Malcolm Douglas, the prosecuting attorney for King County, encompassing the White River Valley, vowed to pursue violators with zeal. If he proved successful, he proclaimed in the Auburn Globe-Republican, he would drive Japanese from the county.

Tae Kwon Do is a wonderful example of the Japanese concept, Kaizen, which I believe is a foundational practice for success in any and every aspect of life. Kaizen is the idea that small incremental improvements add up over time to yield big results. It’s simple, it’s powerful, and it works.

Unbeknownst to the Japanese, the main disadvantage Japan would have at Midway was the fact the U.S. could read their radio traffic. With the success of their codebreakers, Americans were able to understand Japan’s communications in the Pacific in the days leading up to the battle, and even when the routine issue of new Japanese code books meant that the Americans were once again in the dark, analysts working for the Navy in Hawaii were reasonably confident that as the Japanese units left port, Midway was their target and June 4 would be the date of their arrival.

The decision to partner the government was clearly a top-down decision taken by Suzuki himself, based on Nakanishi’s positive report. The speed of decision making was a result of the pressure from the Indian side as well as the dynamism and ability of Suzuki to take truly entrepreneurial risks. When asked as to why he took what appeared to most people, including the Japanese embassy in India, as an unwarranted risk, Suzuki explained that he always believed that it was people who determined how any project performed, and everything else was secondary. He said that at the time of the first meeting with Krishnamurthy and me, he was convinced that he could work with us and ensure success. If he did not have this feeling, he would not have asked the Maruti team to stay back till he returned from the United States. I wonder how many people in the world could take a decision to invest $25 million on this ground. Suzuki showed that his faith in the importance of people as the basis for doing business was better than the technical evaluations which companies made and which showed that India was not a good place to invest money.

Have you ever tidied madly, only to find that all too soon your home or workspace is cluttered again? If so, let me share with you the secret of success. Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go.

FOREWORD When Commander Perry opened up to the occidental world that shut-tight little island Kingdom, Japan, he did more than merely contact for our manufacturers a people who bought "Nifty Clothes," with two pair of pants. He gave us an insight into a world that was thoroughly organized and civilized long before Columbus discovered West where the East should have been. The Japanese learned much from the so-called civilized world, -but they taught us something we could never have learned from intercourse with any other nation. They gave our governmental forces of law and order a weapon that aided materially in the suppression of disorderly elements throughout our great cities. It took time, of course, to break down the prejudices that our early enforcement officers, in common with our then wild and wooly population, had against anything that was foreign. But when the great police forces of our largest metropolises realized that guns and billies alone would not be proof against big, burly lawbreakers, and that to instil respect in the hearts of "bruisers" they needed something other than armaments—pistols that could not be drawn fast enough,—they then discovered the wonder of Jiu-jitsu. They found that the wily little brown man depended on brain instead of brawn and that he had developed a Science and an Art that utilized another's strength to his own undoing. Strangely enough it was the layman who first appreciated the potential value of Jiu-jitsu. For many years before the Police Forces of our cities put a study of this Science into the training of every rookie policeman, there were physical culture experts in America who advocated the use of it by everyone who had any respect for physical prowess but who found the spirit more willing than the flesh. They showed that it needed no possession of unusual strength to overcome an opponent that depended entirely on his bulk and ferocious appearance to cow the meeker ones of the earth into submission. The Japanese, by the very fact of their small stature, are compelled to place more emphasis on strategy than on force. Thus they have thoroughly developed Jiu-jitsu and there is barely a saffron-hued tot in Japan that doesn't know something about the "Gentle-Art" as it is known. President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, one of the world's greatest educators, who, together with millions of his enlightened and progressive countrymen, is a firm believer in "a strong mind in a strong body," sought to teach every schoolboy in his country some knowledge of the wisest of all physical sciences. While it does not itself develop and build muscle, it is an invaluable aid to the sensible use of the body. It is a form of wrestling that combines the cunning of the fox with the lithe grace and agility of the panther. It sharpens the brain and quickens the nerve centers. The man or woman who has self-respect must not sit by and permit our people to become a nation of spectators watching athletic specialists perform, while we become obese and ungainly applauders. Jiu-jitsu gives the man, woman and child, denied by nature a great frame, the opportunity to walk without fear, to resist successfully the bullies of their particular world, and the self-confidence which only a "well-armed" athlete can have. By its use, differences in weight, height and reach are practically wiped out, so that he who knows, may smilingly face superior odds and conquer.

Any investment that has become a topic of widespread conversation is likely to be hazardous to your wealth. It was true of gold in the early 1980s and Japanese real estate and stocks in the late 1980s. It was true of Internet-related stocks in the late 1990s and condominiums in California, Nevada, and Florida in the first decade of the 2000s, as well as bitcoin in 2017.

Minimalism never chases fame, glamour, or success.

Gilder G, 1996. The Moral Sources of Capitalism. In: Gerson M (ed.), The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., pp. 151-159 Quoting page 154: The next step above potlatching was the use of real money. The invention of money enabled the pattern of giving to be extended as far as the reach of faith and trust from the mumi’s tribe to the world economy. Among the most important transitional devices was the Chinese Hui. This became the key mode of capital formation for the overseas Chinese in their phenomenal success as tradesmen and retailers everywhere they went, from San Francisco to Singapore. A more sophisticated and purposeful development of the potlatching principle, the Hui began when the organizer needed money for an investment. He would raise it from a group of kin and friends and commit himself to give a series of ten feasts for them. At each feast a similar amount of money would be convivially raised and given by lot or by secret bidding to one of the other members. The rotating distribution would continue until every member had won a collection. Similar systems, called the Ko or Tanamoshi, created saving for the Japanese; and the West African Susu device of the Yoruba, when transplanted to the West Indies, provided the capital base for Caribbean retailing. This mode of capital formation also emerged prosperously among West Indians when they migrated to American cities. All these arrangements required entrusting money or property to others and awaiting returns in the uncertain future.

No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining

underlies the Toyota Production System. At Toyota, this goes by the Japanese term genchi gembutsu, which is one of the most important phrases in the lean manufacturing vocabulary. In English, it is usually translated as a directive to “go and see for yourself” so that business decisions can be based on deep firsthand knowledge. Jeffrey Liker, who has extensively documented the “Toyota Way,” explains it this way: In my Toyota interviews, when I asked what distinguishes the Toyota Way from other management approaches, the most common first response was genchi gembutsu—whether I was in manufacturing, product development, sales, distribution, or public affairs. You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to

In 1931, Japan went broke—i.e., it was forced to draw down its gold reserves, abandon the gold standard, and float its currency, which depreciated it so greatly that Japan ran out of buying power. These terrible conditions and large wealth gaps led to fighting between the left and the right. By 1932, there was a massive upsurge in right-wing nationalism and militarism, in the hope that order and economic stability could be forcibly restored. Japan set out to get the natural resources (e.g., oil, iron, coal, and rubber) and human resources (i.e., slave labor) it needed by seizing them from other countries, invading Manchuria in 1931 and spreading out through China and Asia. As with Germany, it could be argued that Japan’s path of military aggression to get needed resources was more cost-effective than relying on classic trading and economic practices. In 1934, there was severe famine in parts of Japan, causing even more political turbulence and reinforcing the right-wing, militaristic, nationalistic, and expansionistic movement. In the years that followed, Japan’s top-down fascist command economy grew stronger, building a military-industrial complex to protect its existing bases in East Asia and northern China and support its excursions into other countries. As was also the case in Germany, while most Japanese companies remained privately held, their production was controlled by the government. What is fascism? Consider the following three big choices that a country has to make when selecting its approach to governance: 1) bottom-up (democratic) or top-down (autocratic) decision making, 2) capitalist or communist (with socialist in the middle) ownership of production, and 3) individualistic (which treats the well-being of the individual with paramount importance) or collectivist (which treats the well-being of the whole with paramount importance). Pick the one from each category that you believe is optimal for your nation’s values and ambitions and you have your preferred approach. Fascism is autocratic, capitalist, and collectivist. Fascists believe that top-down autocratic leadership, in which the government directs the production of privately held companies such that individual gratification is subordinated to national success, is the best way to make the country and its people wealthier and more powerful.

No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.” YOUTH:

Yet the boy himself was utterly unself-conscious, and the American observers wondered why they felt worse than he did. “Our culture exacts a great cost psychologically for making a mistake,” Stigler recalled, “whereas in Japan, it doesn’t seem to be that way. In Japan, mistakes, error, confusion [are] all just a natural part of the learning process.”21 (The boy eventually mastered the problem, to the cheers of his classmates.) The researchers also found that 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; it’s 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.

In the history of warfare, a succession of bold ideas and weapons had promised to curb the tyranny of distance. The horse and the cavalry had revolutionised warfare and tamed distance; but the Boer War, where more than 300,000 horses were killed in the fighting, foreshadowed the declining role of the horse. In the First World War the flimsy aircraft flourished high above the trenches without seeming likely to conquer distance; and yet in the Second World War the Japanese launched their devastating aerial attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the huge American aircraft dropped the first atomic bombs on two distant Japanese cities in 1945. In various other phases of the war, however, distance was still a powerful obstacle. In the following decades the latest American and Soviet missiles covered vast distances, but many military leaders in the nuclear era believed that ‘the tyranny of distance’ was far from ended.

The first Superfortress reached Tokyo just after midnight, dropping flares to mark the target area. Then came the onslaught. Hundreds of planes—massive winged mechanical beasts roaring over Tokyo, flying so low that the entire city pulsed with the booming of their engines. The US military’s worries about the city’s air defenses proved groundless: the Japanese were completely unprepared for an attacking force coming in at five thousand feet. The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reached them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their backs only to discover—when they stopped to rest—that their babies were on fire. People jumped into the canals off the Sumida River, only to drown when the tide came in or when hundreds of others jumped on top of them. People tried to hang on to steel bridges until the metal grew too hot to the touch, and then they fell to their deaths. After the war, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” As many as 100,000 people died that night. The aircrews who flew that mission came back shaken. [According to historian] Conrad Crane: “They’re about five thousand feet, they are pretty low... They are low enough that the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft...They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas, because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft. (...) The historian Conrad Crane told me: I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation, one of the senior Japanese historians there stood up and said, “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.” That kind of took me aback. And then he explained: “We would have surrendered eventually anyway, but the impact of the massive firebombing campaign and the atomic bombs was that we surrendered in August.” In other words, this Japanese historian believed: no firebombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese don’t surrender. And if they don’t surrender, the Soviets invade, and then the Americans invade, and Japan gets carved up, just as Germany and the Korean peninsula eventually were. Crane added, The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter. Because what happens is that by surrendering in August, that givesMacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feedJapan...I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s great successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.He is referring to General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers in the Pacific. He was the one who accepted theJapanese emperor’s surrender.Curtis LeMay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible. In 1964, the Japanese government awarded LeMay the highest award their country could give a foreigner, the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force. “Bygones are bygones,” the premier of Japan said at the time.

In fact, anything that is of value in life only multiplies when it is given. That which doesn't multiply through giving is neither worth giving nor worth receiving. If, through the act of giving, you feel you have lost something, then the gift is not truly given and will not cause increase. If you give grudgingly, there is no energy behind that giving. It is the intention behind your giving and receiving that is the most important thing. The intention should always be to create happiness for the giver and receiver, because happiness is life-supporting and life-sustaining and therefore generates increase. The return is directly proportional to the giving when it is unconditional and from the heart.

There is only one choice, out of the infinity of choices available in every second, that will create happiness for you as well as for those around you. And when you make that one choice, it will result in a form of behaviour that is called spontaneous right action. Spontaneous right action is the right action at the right moment. It's the right response to every situation as it happens. It's the action that nourishes you and everyone else who is influenced by that action. There is a very interesting mechanism that the universe has to help you make spontaneously correct choices. The mechanism has to do with sensations in your body. Your body experiences two kinds of sensations: one is a sensation of comfort, the other is a sensation of discomfort. At the moment you consciously make a choice, pay attention to your body and ask your body, “If I make this choice, what happens? If your body sends a message of comfort, that's the right choice. If your body sends a message of discomfort, then it's not the appropriate choice.

The kingdom rose to power when it successfully conquered a total of thirty states of the Japanese islands

The Onin War erupted in 1467 over the succession of the next shogun.

This is what is so terrifying about competition. Even if you’re not a loser, even if you’re someone who keeps on winning, if you are someone who has placed himself in competition, you will never have a moment’s peace. You don’t want to be a loser. And you always have to keep on winning if you don’t want to be a loser. You can’t trust other people. The reason so many people don’t really feel happy while they’re building up their success in the eyes of society is that they are living in competition. Because to them, the world is a perilous place that is overflowing with enemies.

When he finished he had a magnificent house, perched on the edge of a precipice at whose feet the ocean thundered, but it was a house that knew no happiness, for shortly after Whip had moved in with his third wife, the Hawaiian-Chinese beauty Ching-ching, who was pregnant at the time, she had caught him fooling around with the brothel girls that flourished in the town of Kapaa. Without even a scene of recrimination, Ching-ching had simply ordered a carriage and driven back to the capital town of Lihune, where she boarded an H & H steamer for Honolulu. She divorced Whip but kept both his daughter Iliki and his yet-unborn son John. Now there were two Mrs. Whipple Hoxworths in Honolulu and they caused some embarrassment to the more staid community. There was his first wife, Iliki Janders Hoxworth, who moved in only the best missionary circles, and there was Ching-ching Hoxworth who lived within the Chinese community. The two never met, but Howxworth & Hale saw to it that each received a monthly allowance. The sums were generous, but not so much so as those sent periodically Wild Whip's second wife, the fiery Spanish girl named Aloma Duarte Hoxworth, whose name frequently appeared in New York and London newspapers... p623 When the polo players had departed, when the field kitchens were taken down, and when the patient little Japanese gardeners were tending each cut in the polo turf as if it were a personal wound, Wild Whip would retire to his sprawling mansion overlooking the sea and get drunk. He was never offensive and never beat anyone while intoxicated. At such times he stayed away from the brothels in Kapaa and away from the broad lanai from which he could see the ocean. In a small, darkened room he drank, and as he did so he often recalled his grandfather's words: "Girls are like stars, and you could reach up and pinch each one on the points. And then in the east the moon rises, enormous and perfect. And that's something else, entirely different." It was now apparent to Whip, in his forty-fifth year, that for him the moon did not intend to rise. Somehow he had missed encountering the woman whom he could love as his grandfather had loved the Hawaiian princess Noelani. He had known hundreds of women, but he had found none that a man could permanently want or respect. Those who were desirable were mean in spirit and those who were loyal were sure to be tedious. It was probably best, he thought at such times, to do as he did: know a couple of the better girls at Kapaa, wait for some friend's wife who was bored with her husband, or trust that a casual trip through the more settled camps might turn up some workman's wife who wanted a little excitement. It wasn't a bad life and was certainly less expensive in the long run than trying to marry and divorce a succession of giddy women; but often when he had reached this conclusion, through the bamboo shades of the darkened room in which he huddled a light would penetrate, and it would be the great moon risen from the waters to the east and now passing majestically high above the Pacific. It was an all-seeing beacon, brillant enough to make the grassy lawns on Hanakai a sheet of silver, probing enough to find any mansion tucked away beneath the casuarina trees. When this moon sought out Wild Whip he would first draw in his feet, trying like a child to evade it, but when it persisted he often rose, threw open the lanai screens, and went forth to meet it. p625

No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes.

In many ways, Keizan’s Zen is a continuation of the Zen of the founder of Japanese Soto Zen, Dogen—and this should not be particularly surprising. Yet, the two men were different individuals with different teaching methods and different emphases in their writings. In the course of documenting the patriarchal succession over the generations, Keizan centers his talks primarily on two topics. One is the necessity of being totally committed to achieving awakening, of taking the Zen life most seriously, and of making a supreme effort in Zen practice. This is also a focal point in Dogen’s writing, and both men, as Zen patriarchs, are equally concerned with the training of monks and the selection of successors. The second emphasis, and, indeed, the overwhelmingly central focal point of all these chapters, is the Light of the title of the work. It is this light that is transmitted from master to disciple as the disciple discovers this light within himself. In fact, once the light is discovered, this itself is the transmission. The light is one’s Buddha nature or True Self.

If you can correctly identify the vocation that you are best suited for, then the spark of intrinsic motivation will illuminate within you

The call of the road is loudest when your pace has halted.

One day— perhaps a decade from now—you might wake up to realize that your life situation remains unchanged or has even gotten worse. This is the most unfortunate consequence of inactivity, lethargy, procrastination, and sloth. Once your time is gone, it’s gone. Mankind can create many things, but we can’t create time. The amount of time available for the accomplishment of your goals is forever decreasing. With each tick of the clock, the end of your time draws nearer. This is why you must value your time as you value a diamond ring or a gold watch. It’s a precious resource that can never be replenished.

In German concentration camps, as in those that would later be built in Japan and Korea, psychiatrists confirmed that the prisoners with the greatest chance of survival were those who had things they wanted to accomplish outside the camp, those who felt a strong need to get out of there alive. This was true of Frankl, who, after being released and successfully developing the school of logotherapy, realized he had been the first patient of his own practice. Frankl had a goal to achieve, and it made him persevere. He arrived at Auschwitz carrying a manuscript that contained all the theories and research he had compiled over the course of

Tomorrow

with

This is how you will awake each morning, caught in this human dilemma.

When people revert to clutter no matter how much they tidy, it is not their room or their belongings but their way of thinking that is at fault. Even if they are initially inspired, they can't stay motivated and their efforts peter out. The root cause lies in the fact that they can't see the results or feel the effects. This is precisely why success depends on experiencing tangible results immediately. If you use the right method and concentrate your efforts on eliminating clutter thoroughly and completely within a short span of time, you'll see instant results that will empower you to keep your space in order after. Anyone who experiences this process, no matter who they are, will vow never to revert to clutter again.

From the time she opened her doors to the modern world in 1867, Japan has been consistently underrated by westerners, despite her successful defeats of China and then Russia in 1894 and 1905, respectively; despite Pearl Harbor; and despite her sudden emergence as an economic superpower and the toughest competitor in the world market of the 1970s and 1980s. A major reason, perhaps the major one, is the prevailing belief that innovation has to do with things and is based on science or technology. And the Japanese, so the common belief has held (in Japan as well as in the West, by the way), are not innovators but imitators. For the Japanese have not, by and large, produced outstanding technical or scientific innovations. Their success is based on social innovation.

This is precisely why success depends on experiencing tangible results immediately. If you use the right method and concentrate your efforts on eliminating clutter thoroughly and completely within a short span of time, you’ll see instant results that will empower you to keep your space in order ever after. Anyone who experiences this process, no matter who they are, will vow never to revert to clutter again.

In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally, “not know mind.” To have a “not know mind” is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it. When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality—a beginner’s mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? (This is often something they later look back upon wistfully.) But when that company becomes successful, its leaders often cast off that startup mentality because, they tell themselves, they have figured out what to do. They don’t want to be beginners anymore. That may be human nature, but I believe it is a part of our nature that should be resisted. By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.

Tidying brings visible results. Tidying never lies. The ultimate secret of success is this: If you tidy up in one shot, rather than little by little, you can dramatically change your mind-set. A change so profound that it touches your emotions will irresistibly affect your way of thinking and your lifestyle habits.

Your life as an effective person must always have productivity surrounding all your efforts, there must be a sustained forward and upward trajectory in every area of your life. This is where the Shona Shereketa meets the Japanese Kaizen - you are moving and shaking past mediocrity on the basis of small but continuous improvements that will ultimately result in positive quality changes to your life.

in American animation the dialogue is recorded first. Even though that may sound like a little technical, procedural issue, it actually affects how animation is used, the aesthetics, and the entire approach to the idea of animation as performance. This is a central difference between American animation and Japanese animation.

Japanese anime such as Akira (Otomo, 1988), Oneamisu No Tsubasa (Wings of Honneamise, Yamaga, 1987/1994) and Kokaku kidotai (Ghost in the Shell, Oshii, 1995), and strange live-action movies such as Ganheddo (Gunhed, Harada, 1989), Tetsuo (The Iron Man, Tsukamoto, 1989) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Tsukamoto, 1991) found international success.

The textbook was born from analyzing actual movements, but these were still the exaggerated gestures of Europeans and Americans They portrayed ‘Western (bata-kusai; lit., smelling of butter)’ movements, like the way some Japanese who have lived abroad will spread their arms and shake their head when they say ‘Oh no!

The cause is not lack of skills but rather lack of awareness and the inability to make tidying a regular habit. In other words, the root of the problem lies in the mind. Success is 90 percent dependent on our mind-set.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. I mentioned I’d been in contact with her mother. “Oh crikey, that sounds dangerous!” “She’s a feisty woman, isn’t she?” William giggled. “Granny’s great fun after a few gin and tonics.” “Sh, William,” Diana said, giggling too. “My mother’s been a tremendous source of support to me. She never talks publicly; she’s just there for me.” “And what about William’s other granny?” “I have enormous respect for the Queen; she has been so supportive, you know. People don’t see that side of her, but I do all the time. She’s an amazing person.” “Has she been good over the divorce?” “Yes, very. I just want it over now so I can get on with my life. I’m worried about the attacks I will get afterward.” “What attacks?” “I just worry that people will try and knock me down once I am out on my own.” This seemed unduly paranoid. People adored her. I asked William how he was enjoying Eton. “Oh, it’s great, thanks.” “Do you think the press bother you much?” “Not the British press, actually. Though the European media can be quite annoying. They sit on the riverbank watching me rowing with their cameras, waiting for me to fall in! There are photographers everywhere if I go out. Normally loads of Japanese tourists taking pictures. All saying “Where’s Prince William?’ when I’m standing right next to them.” “How are the other boys with you?” “Very nice. Though a boy was expelled this week for taking ecstasy and snuff. Drugs are everywhere, and I think they’re stupid. I never get tempted.” “Does matron take any?” laughed Diana. “No, Mummy, it gives her hallucinations.” “What, like imagining you’re going to be king?” I said. They both giggled again. “Is it true you’ve got Pamela Anderson posters on your bedroom wall?” “No! And not Cindy Crawford, either. They did both come to tea at the palace, though, and were very nice.” William had been photographed the previous week at a party at the Hammersmith Palais, where he was mobbed by young girls. I asked him if he’d had fun. “Everyone in the press said I was snogging these girls, but I wasn’t,” he insisted. Diana laughed. “One said you stuck your tongue down her throat, William. Did you?” “No, I did not. Stop it, Mummy, please. It’s embarrassing.” He’d gone puce. It was a very funny exchange, with a flushed William finally insisting: “I won’t go to any more public parties; it was crazy. People wouldn’t leave me alone.” Diana laughed again. “All the girls love a nice prince.” I turned to more serious matters. “Do you think Charles will become king one day?” “I think he thinks he will,” replied Diana, “but I think he would be happier living in Tuscany or Provence, to be honest.” “And how are you these days--someone told me you’ve stopped seeing therapists?” “I have, yes. I stopped when I realized they needed more therapy than I did. I feel stronger now, but I am under so much pressure all the time. People don’t know what it’s like to be in the public eye, they really don’t.

In 2010, she wrote another bestseller, Unbroken, the story of Louis Zamperini, a U.S. Army Air Corps lieutenant during World War II who crashed at sea and, after forty-seven days aboard a life raft, was captured and tortured by the Japanese.12 "I'm attracted," Hillenbrand says, "to subjects who overcome tremendous suffering and learn to cope emotionally with it." Zamperini himself summed up the secret to Hillenbrand's successful writing career: "because she's suffered so much in life, she was able to put my feelings into words." Every constraint, whether physical or mental, external or internal, can be a catalyst for moving up our learning curve.

For me personally, there is one motivating factor more powerful than any other: one day we will all die. Why would you not want to live a full and fun life and be everything that you can be?