Tokyo Story Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Tokyo Story. Here they are! All 81 of them:

If you were to write a story with me in the lead role, it would certainly be... a tragedy
Sui Ishida (Tokyo Ghoul, Tome 1 (Tokyo Ghoul, #1))
King Norodom of Cambodia replied, “Lt. General Kawamura of the Japanese Imperial Army, It is my understanding that you Japanese are granting my people a partial freedom which is always subject to the approval of any laws we make by the Japanese Government in Tokyo!” (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)
Michael G. Kramer
What comes from the heart will go to the heart
Renae Lucas-Hall
Yamamoto sensed a feeling of culmination about the huge success of the first strike, and the same incisive intuition that guided his brilliant moves at the gaming tables told him what the next move on the bridge of Akagi would be. In (Vice Admiral) Nagumo he knew his man. Nagumo had never been committed to the Pearl Harbor mission. He had not been Yamamoto’s choice to command the Striking Force; his assignment was the decision of the Navy Ministry in Tokyo, based on seniority. While the exultation of the officers and sailors on his staff swirled around him, Yamamoto sat quietly. Finally, he fixed a steely gaze on his chief of staff, and in a low, intense voice: “Admiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.
Dale A. Jenkins (Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway)
If you were to write a story with me in the lead role, it would certainly be... a tragedy.
Sui Ishida
Unfortunately, much of the important information Ambassador Grew sent to Washington was largely overlooked or ignored, and dialogue between Washington and Tokyo was strained. This state of affairs is indicated by Grew’s cable on July 10, 1941, in which he pointed out that he had to go to the British ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie, to find out about discussions between the State Department and the Japanese ambassador in Washington. This occurred because the State Department kept the British ambassador in Washington abreast of events, who promptly informed the foreign secretary in London, who in turn informed their ambassador in Tokyo. Sir Robert then kindly passed the information to Ambassador Grew.
Dale A. Jenkins (Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway)
In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. "The entire EU is short on coins." And I say, "Really?" because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like "We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.
David Sedaris (When You Are Engulfed in Flames)
I am a college student who likes to read like you could find anywhere I am not a protagonist of novel or anything But If, for argument’s sake, you were to write story with me in a lead role It would certainly be A tragedy
Sui Ishida
Even now I occasionally get a long letter from Kimiko, who’s still in and out of mental hospitals. I’ve never written a reply. The Last Picture Show Iwas eighteen.
Ryū Murakami (Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories)
that you don’t suffer because of someone else. There’s never anyone but
Ryū Murakami (Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories)
Most of the advice was along the lines of, “If you persevere in your efforts you will surely succeed,” which is bullshit, if you ask me. People who turn to stuff like this have probably already persevered and gotten nowhere.
Ryū Murakami (Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories)
This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.
Edward Abbey
The overriding sense of Tokyo...is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future.
David Rakoff (Fraud: Essays)
Given neither talent, nor glory, but only tragedy, the story of our main character begins to unfold.
Tokyo Ghoul
I’m not the protagonist of a novel or anything. I’m a college student who likes to read, like you could find anywhere. But.. if, for argument’s sake, you were to write a story with me in the lead role, it would certainly be a TRAGEDY!
Sui Ishida (Tokyo Ghoul, Tome 1 (Tokyo Ghoul, #1))
As Halloran parachuted over Tokyo, the Zero that had shot him down sped toward him, and Halloran was certain that he was going to be strafed, as so many falling airmen were. But instead of firing, the pilot saluted him. After the war, Halloran and that pilot, Isamu Kashiide, became dear friends.
Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption)
If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others. Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are a whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world. Yet without a proper ego nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there? At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that ego. Just what kind of narrative? It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway, most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios-they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their own self-identity.
Haruki Murakami (Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche)
Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened. One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street. “This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.” “And you,” she said to him, “are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.” They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle. As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily? And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, “Let’s test ourselves - just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?” “Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what we should do.” And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west. The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully. One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season’s terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence’s piggy bank. They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love. Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty. One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew: She is the 100% perfect girl for me. He is the 100% perfect boy for me. But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever. A sad story, don’t you think?
Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes)
Dr. Y. Hiraiwa, professor of Hiroshima University of Literature and Science, and one of my church members, was buried by the bomb under the two storied house with his son, a student of Tokyo University. Both of them could not move an inch under tremendously heavy pressure. And the house already caught fire. His son said, ‘Father, we can do nothing except make our mind up to consecrate our lives for the country. Let us give Banzai to our Emperor.’ Then the father followed after his son, ‘Tenno-heika, Banzai, Banzai, Banzai!’ . . . In thinking of their experience of that time Dr. Hiraiwa repeated, ‘What a fortunate that we are Japanese! It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.
John Hersey (Hiroshima)
Rosette disappeared onto the dance floor. Wells sat in silence for a minute, watching the dancers. The worldwide cult of fast money spent stupidly. The worldwide cult of trying too hard. Moscow, Rio, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York, London, Shanghai--the story was the same everywhere. The same overloud music, the same overpromoted brand names, the same fake tits, about as erotic as helium balloons. Everywhere an orgy of empty consumption and bad sex. Las Vegas was the cult's world headquarters, Donald Trump its patron saint. Wells had spent ten years in the barren mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He never wanted to live there again. But if he had to choose between an eternity there or in the supposed luxury of this club, he'd go back without a second thought.
Alex Berenson (The Silent Man (John Wells, #3))
I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.
Yū Miri (Tokyo Ueno Station)
*2 As Halloran parachuted over Tokyo, the Zero that had shot him down sped toward him, and Halloran was certain that he was going to be strafed, as so many falling airmen were. But instead of firing, the pilot saluted him. After the war, Halloran and that pilot, Isamu Kashiide, became dear friends.
Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption)
Humans, however, can’t live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial
Haruki Murakami (Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (Vintage International))
The book has had one unexpected side effect: by disdaining Koreans' complaints, it actually touches upon Japan's less-then-noble history with Korea, which is something the Ministry of Education has worked hard to keep out of the public school system. Apparently not knowing history means never having to say you're story.
Jake Adelstein (Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan)
I think of the story of Hachikō the Akita, who used to go to Tokyo’s Shibuya Station to meet the train that brought his master home from work every day—until one day the man died suddenly and Hachikō waited in vain. But the next day, and every day after that, for nearly ten years, the dog appeared at the station to meet the train at the usual hour.
Sigrid Nunez (The Friend)
No one gets drunk in order to raise their moral standards.
Ryū Murakami (Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories)
What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever figured out how to design its future. That future may be germinating today not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other -- a kindly British orphanage in the grim foothills of Peru, a house for the dying in a back street of Calcutta run by a fiercely single-minded Albanian nun, an easy-going French medical team at the starving edge of the Sahel, a mission to Somalia by Irish social workers who remember their own Great Hunger, a nursery program to assist convict-mothers at a New York Prison -- in some unheralded corner where a great-hearted human being is committed to loving o9utcasts in an extraordinary way.
Thomas Cahill (How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe)
Faced with the prospect of a black depression, Highsmith once again retreated into fantasy, dreaming about an affair with the actress Anne Meacham, whose picture she had seen in a magazine publicising her role in the Tennessee Williams' play, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. After the disasters of recent years, she reckoned that the safest option was to escape into romantic imagination. She reviewed her failures over the past five years and concluded that 'the moral is: stay alone. Any idea of any close relationship should be imaginary, like any story I am writing. This way no harm is done to me or to any other person'.
Andrew Wilson (Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι)
I can never thank my parents enough for giving me the oppor­tunity to grow up in the country. If I had gone with my parents to somewhere like Tokyo when I was seven years old, I should be a completely different person. I believe that ... my heart would not have been capable of receiving and understanding the noble sentiments of poetry. As it was, I spent seven of the happiest years in my life roaming around the fields and hills near my home.
Doppo Kunikida (River Mist and Other Stories)
But were we able to offer “them” a more viable narrative? Did we have a narrative potent enough to chase away Asahara’s “utter nonsense”? That was the big task. I am a novelist, and as we all know a novelist is someone who works with “narratives,” who spins “stories” professionally. Which meant to me that the task at hand was like a gigantic sword dangling above my head. It’s something I’m going to have to deal with much more seriously from here on. I know I’m going to have to construct a “cosmic communication device” of my own. I’ll probably have to piece together every last scrap of junk, every weakness, every deficiency inside me to do it. (There, I’ve gone and said it—but the real surprise is that it’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do as a writer all along!)
Haruki Murakami (Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche)
simple “emblem” of a story will do for this sort of narrative, the same way that a war medal bestowed on a soldier doesn’t have to be pure gold. It’s enough that the medal be backed up by a shared recognition that “this is a medal”, no matter that it’s a cheap tin trinket.
Haruki Murakami (Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche)
The families of the missing are doubly burdened: first by the pain of their ordeal, and then by our expectations of them, expectations of a standard of behavior higher than we require of ourselves. As humans, we seek naturally to help fellow creatures in distress. But most of us, whether we are conscious of it or not, expect something back—the flattery of helplessness and of need.
Richard Lloyd Parry (People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up)
It's hard for me to say this now, but she never rang that special bell inside my ears. I listened as hard as I could, but never once did it ring. Sadly. The girl I knew in Tokyo was the one who did it for me. This isn't something you can choose freely, according to logic or morality. Either it happens or it doesn't. When it does, it happens of its own accord, in your consciousness or in a spot deep in your soul.
Haruki Murakami (First Person Singular: Stories)
In America, they have this thing called a story cycle. When they're at war, they start doing fantasy and war-style entertainment. When fantasy gets big, they go through a recession, and horror starts gaining popularity. When horror gets popular, mystery starts gaining popularity. Then when mystery reaches its peak, science fiction starts gaining popularity. Then things get rough again, and we go back to Fantasy". This quote was taken from an interview from The Myth of Cthulhu: Dark Navigation.
Freddy Sakazaki (Land of the Rising Dead: A Tokyo School Girl's Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse)
get wound up. Kimura was a short, stocky fellow with a tight-permed hairstyle reminiscent of the yakuza from my internship story. When he was sober, he was a great guy. He was a mean drunk, however, and he’d been putting it away all night. He kept picking on me as we entered the next izakaya, and once we were sitting down, he looked over at me and sneered. “I look at you, Adelstein, and I can’t figure out how we lost the war. How could we lose to a bunch of sloppy Americans? Barbarians with no discipline, no culture, and no honor. It beats me. Long live the Emperor!
Jake Adelstein (Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan)
For the first five or six days I didn’t suffer at all, carried along by the change of scene and the sense of a progression. This was the next step in the story. Ivan was in Tokyo and I was here. It was like when two characters in a movie went to two different places. Then something changed. My life no longer seemed like a movie to me. Ivan was still in the movie, but had left me behind. Nothing extraordinary was happening anymore, or would ever happen again. I was just there with my relatives, living pointless, shapeless days that weren’t bringing me any closer to anything. It seemed to me that this state of affairs was a relief to my mother. From her perspective, I thought, the past weeks had been a perilous, temporary adventure, something to be endured, and now things were back to normal. It was painful to feel at such cross-purposes with her. Almost everything that was interesting or meaningful in my story was, in her story, a pointless hazard or annoyance. This was even more true with my aunts. They didn’t take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn’t challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn’t know how to do anything real. I didn’t know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn’t just a self-improvement project. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn’t say what you were supposed to do.
Elif Batuman (The Idiot)
From Walt: The Grapes of Wrath, Les Misérables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, The Ox-Bow Incident, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote (where your nickname came from), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and anything by Anton Chekhov. From Henry: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Cheyenne Autumn, War and Peace, The Things They Carried, Catch-22, The Sun Also Rises, The Blessing Way, Beyond Good and Evil, The Teachings of Don Juan, Heart of Darkness, The Human Comedy, The Art of War. From Vic: Justine, Concrete Charlie: The Story of Philadelphia Football Legend Chuck Bednarik, Medea (you’ll love it; it’s got a great ending), The Kama Sutra, Henry and June, The Onion Field, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zorba the Greek, Madame Bovary, Richie Ashburn’s Phillies Trivia (fuck you, it’s a great book). From Ruby: The Holy Bible (New Testament), The Pilgrim’s Progress, Inferno, Paradise Lost, My Ántonia, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Poems of Emily Dickinson, My Friend Flicka, Our Town. From Dorothy: The Gastronomical Me, The French Chef Cookbook (you don’t eat, you don’t read), Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals From Death Row, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Something Fresh, The Sound and the Fury, The Maltese Falcon, Pride and Prejudice, Brides-head Revisited. From Lucian: Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Band of Brothers, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Virginian, The Basque History of the World (so you can learn about your heritage you illiterate bastard), Hondo, Sackett, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Quartered Safe Out Here. From Ferg: Riders of the Purple Sage, Kiss Me Deadly, Lonesome Dove, White Fang, A River Runs Through It (I saw the movie, but I heard the book was good, too), Kip Carey’s Official Wyoming Fishing Guide (sorry, kid, I couldn’t come up with ten but this ought to do).
Craig Johnson (Hell Is Empty (Walt Longmire, #7))
You don’t like feeling powerless? Then change your definition of power. Do not fix unfixable problems. Do not devote yourself to things you cannot control. You cannot make this world respect you. You cannot make it dignify you. It will never bend to you. This world does not belong to door. She tied her long hair away from her face, meticulously turning on specific track lights and not others, perhaps to highlight the beauty of her Scandinavian-style furniture choices or the incomparable city view. Then she poured herself a glass of wine from a previously opened bottle, joining Reina on the sofa with an air of hospitably withheld dread. “I was born here in Tokyo,” Reina commented. “Not far from here, actually. There was a fire the day I was born. People died. My grandmother always thought it meant something that I was—” She broke off. “What I was.” “People often search for meaning where there is none,” said Aiya placidly. Perhaps in a tone of sympathy, though Reina wasn’t sure what to think anymore. “Just because you can see two points does not mean anything exists between them.” “In other words, fate is a lie we tell ourselves?” asked Reina drolly. Aiya shrugged. Despite the careful curation of her lighting, she looked tired. “We tell ourselves many stories. But I don’t think you came here just to tell me yours.” No. Reina did not know why she was there, not really. She had simply wanted to go home, and when she realized home was an English manor house, she had railed against the idea so hard it brought her here, to the place she’d once done everything in her power to escape. “I want,” Reina began slowly, “to do good. Not because I love the world, but because I hate it. And not because I can,” she added. “But because everyone else won’t.” Aiya sighed, perhaps with amusement. “The Society doesn’t promise you a better world, Reina. It doesn’t because it can’t.” “Why not? I was promised everything I could ever dream of. I was offered power, and yet I have never felt so powerless.” The words left her like a kick to the chest, a hard stomp. She hadn’t realized that was the problem until now, sitting with a woman who so clearly lived alone. Who had everything, and yet at the same time, Reina did not see anything in Aiya Sato’s museum of a life that she would covet for her own. Aiya sipped her wine quietly, in a way that made Reina feel sure that Aiya saw her as a child, a lost little lamb. She was too polite to ask her to leave, of course. That wasn’t the way of things and Reina ought to know it. Until then, Aiya would simply hold the thought in her head. “So,” Aiya said with an air of teacherly patience. “You are disappointed in the world. Why should the Society be any better? It is part of the same world.” “But I should be able to fix things. Change things.” “Why?” “Because I should.” Reina felt restless. “Because if the world cannot be fixed by me, then how can it be fixed at all?” “These sound like questions for the Forum,” Aiya said with a shrug. “If you want to spend your life banging down doors that will never open, try their tactics instead, see how it goes. See if the mob can learn to love you, Reina Mori, without consuming or destroying you first.” Another reflective sip. “The Society is no democracy. In fact, it chose you because you are selfish.” She looked demurely at Reina. “It promised you glory, not salvation. They never said you could save others. Only yourself.” “And that is power to you?” Aiya’s smile was so polite that Reina felt it like the edge of a weapon. “You don’t like feeling powerless? Then change your definition of power. Do not fix unfixable problems. Do not devote yourself to things you cannot control. You cannot make this world respect you. You cannot make it dignify you. It will never bend to you. This world does not belong to you, Reina Mori, you belong to it, and perhaps when it is ready for a revolution it will look to you for leadership.
Olivie Blake (The Atlas Complex (The Atlas, #3))
We ate spiral-wrapped eel meat. We ate guts. We ate liver, which is somehow different from guts. We (mostly Iris) ate two bowls of of crispy fried eel backbones. We ate eel meat wrapped around burdock root and eel fin wrapped around garlic chives. We ate smoked eel that tasted like Jewish deli food. I ate better than anyone, because I was the only member of the family willing to try the offal. All of it was precisely like Oishinbo, down to the eel anatomy chart on the wall. It was like stepping into a book, Neverending Story-style, and isn't a Luck Dragon just a big furry eel?
Matthew Amster-Burton (Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo)
Another U.S. official disturbed by the prospect of a Washington-Tokyo truce was the Treasury’s Harry Dexter White. “Persons in our government,” White declaimed, “are hoping to betray the cause of the heroic Chinese people.
M. Stanton Evans (Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies)
Christa had quickly discovered one of the defining features of life as a foreigner in Japan and the reason it attracts so many misfits of different kinds: personal alienation, that inescapable sense of being different from everyone else, is canceled out by the larger, universal alienation of being a gaijin.
Richard Lloyd Parry (People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up)
Isabella Secret Story 6 What should your website contain Isabella Di FabioWhether you are in the initial phase of your business and you are looking for the right design for a website, you are considering a redesign of your Website or you are wondering how to generate more leads from your site, there are several critical elements that you should never forget to include. If you already have a website, the first thing we advise you is to check the home page since it is undoubtedly one of the most important areas of a site. Isabella Secret Story of Homepage - The home page is the gateway of a business to the virtual world, and, in many cases, it is where most of the traffic is generated.
Isabella Secret Story
two months before the release of MAP OF THE SOUL: PERSONA by ARMYPEDIAa, b a kind of treasure hunt hosted by Big Hit Entertainment as a special treat for ARMY. Jumbotron teasers were shown in Seoul, New York, LA, Tokyo, London, Paris, and Hong Kong, and ARMY around the world looked for 2,080 puzzle pieces scattered across the globe and the Internet to piece together. The number 2,080 refers to the 2,080 days from BTS’s debut on June 13, 2013, to February 21, 2019—when ARMYPEDIA was revealed—meaning each piece of the puzzle was a day in the life of BTS itself.
BTS (Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS)
Most urban cherries had been wiped out in Japan during the war, leaving the cities bereft of colour and character. The revival began on a small scale as early as 1948, just three years after Japan’s surrender, when 1,250 trees were planted in the war-burnt fields of Tokyo’s spacious Ueno Park, one of the capital’s first public parks. This had been a popular cherry-viewing, or hanami, site since the early seventeenth century, so it was natural that the government wanted to re-establish this tradition.
Naoko Abe (The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms)
By 1964, when Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games, Somei-yoshino was again Japan’s quintessential cherry.
Naoko Abe (The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms)
Perhaps the most shocking element in the whole story of Unit 731 was MacArthur’s agreement, after the Japanese surrender, to provide immunity from prosecution to all involved, including General Ishii. This deal allowed the Americans to obtain all the data they had accumulated from their experiments. Even after MacArthur had learned that Allied prisoners of war had also been killed in the tests, he ordered that all criminal investigations should cease. Soviet requests to prosecute Ishii and his staff at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal were firmly rejected.
Antony Beevor (The Second World War)
After running away from the United States government to pursue his antigovernment vision, Roger Ver had chosen to live in a place that was uniquely unreceptive to his brand of antiauthoritarian politics. Japan was a country that was still deeply wedded to traditional hierarchies with an educational system that taught its citizens from a young age to obey authority. This was evident in the country’s rigid business traditions—the bowing and exchanging of cards—and in the spiky-haired punks in Tokyo, who waited patiently for walk signals, even when there were no cars in sight. Roger had picked Japan, not because it would allow him to be around other like-minded people, but because he liked the orderliness of Japanese culture—and the women. He had met his longtime Japanese girlfriend at a gathering in California and even she had almost no interest in politics. As Roger discovered, the deferential culture made Japanese people uniquely skeptical about a project like Bitcoin that aimed to challenge government currencies. Japan was the only place Roger had encountered where people’s response, when he described Bitcoin, was to call it scary—rather than interesting or silly. This was due, Roger believed, to the way in which the virtual currency broke from the government’s mandates about how money should work. One of the only people with whom Roger had gotten any traction in Japan was a local pornography tycoon.
Nathaniel Popper (Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money)
Even those we know best are strangers, whom we understand, if we ever do, intermittently.
Richard Lloyd Parry (People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up)
There seemed to be too much gathering of data for their own sake without any thought of practical application—an inevitable development in a statistical and evaluation office unless sternly controlled.
Gordon W. Prange (Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring)
An even more extreme example of a onetime grand gesture yielding results is a story involving Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur and social media pioneer. As a popular speaker, Shankman spends much of his time flying. He eventually realized that thirty thousand feet was an ideal environment for him to focus. As he explained in a blog post, “Locked in a seat with nothing in front of me, nothing to distract me, nothing to set off my ‘Ooh! Shiny!’ DNA, I have nothing to do but be at one with my thoughts.” It was sometime after this realization that Shankman signed a book contract that gave him only two weeks to finish the entire manuscript. Meeting this deadline would require incredible concentration. To achieve this state, Shankman did something unconventional. He booked a round-trip business-class ticket to Tokyo. He wrote during the whole flight to Japan, drank an espresso in the business class lounge once he arrived in Japan, then turned around and flew back, once again writing the whole way—arriving back in the States only thirty hours after he first left with a completed manuscript now in hand. “The trip cost $4,000 and was worth every penny,” he explained.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
You did the only thing you could. That was the right thing. No story is worth dying for, no story is worth your family dying for. Heroes are just people who have run out of choices. You still had a choice. You made the right choice.” I
Jake Adelstein (Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan)
Photos of leisure time are the new status symbols. People line up for hours to buy giant rainbow cotton candy at the Totti Candy Factory in Tokyo, or go to Purl bar in London for a cocktail served with a helium balloon or billowing honey fog, or pursue vacations in more picturesque settings like Iceland and Bali.
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
THE FIRST MORNING This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome—there’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space. For myself I’ll take Moab, Utah. I don’t mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it—the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky—all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.
Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
Turns out, Tokyo is a city of romantics, forgiveness, and graciousness. Since the Women Now! article published, stuffed bears, lanterns, origami, plates of dorayaki, and notes have been placed outside the gates. The guards bring them in by the armload, sifting through to make sure there are no security risks---like a kawaii doll with laser beams for eyes---and bring them to me. Its mostly from teenage girls. Their notes are in the shape of hearts and express their undying support of my non-relationship with Akio. There are other letters, too, from Japanese born abroad who identify with my story and who want to share their own. The response is overwhelming. I never thought I'd ignite such a flame. I'm committed to writing back to everyone who has left an address. Mr. Fuchigami does not like it. But he has left time in my schedule for me to respond. So there.
Emiko Jean (Tokyo Ever After (Tokyo Ever After, #1))
I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.
Yū Miri (Tokyo Ueno Station)
Isabella Di Fabio Web development is a constantly growing field with ever-evolving coding languages ​​and libraries. The basics, however, have long remained the same and are essential for anyone wishing to embark on a career in this field. Isabella Secret Story of Web development is divided into front-end and back-end development, and it pays to understand the requirements for both, no matter what type of developer you want to become. Those who can code and work on both front-end and back-end projects are known as full-stack developers, and people in these roles require in-depth knowledge of both areas.
Isabella Di Fabio
Every story needs a villain. I just wish mine didn't come in double.
Emiko Jean (Tokyo Ever After (Tokyo Ever After, #1))
Stories from long ago are quite good, aren’t they? Sensei said.
Hiromi Kawakami (Strange Weather in Tokyo)
I hope you have enjoyed reading this momento of a story that has ended.
Hiromi Kawakami (Strange Weather in Tokyo)
By the late 1880s more than 30 per cent of all cherry trees in Tokyo were Somei-yoshino.
Naoko Abe (The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms)
the feudal domains were re-designated as prefectures, which were similar to English counties and US states, and the daimyō lords who ruled these fiefdoms were replaced by governors sent from Tokyo.
Naoko Abe (The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms)
I'm a huge fan of mysteries; in fact, they're almost an addiction. If a week goes by without reading a mystery, I suffer withdrawal symptoms. Then I wander around like I'm sleepwalking and wake up in a bookshop, looking for a mystery novel. I've read just about every mystery story ever written...but it's not an intellectual pursuit; it's more like me getting my fill of gossip.
Sōji Shimada (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders)
We all have our place. It doesn't mean the story can't change. It just affects how it will. Besides, I don't even know if I want to be empress. Being a princess is hard enough. Doesn't mean I wouldn't like to have the choice, though. That's what this is about. Choices.
Emiko Jean (Tokyo Ever After (Tokyo Ever After, #1))
Eight. Never put your personal opinions into a story; let someone else do it for you. That’s why experts and commentators exist. Objectivity is a subjective thing.
Jake Adelstein (Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan)
Sometimes I think of my death,’ wrote Kurosawa, ‘I think of ceasing to be... and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.’ The story of a man diagnosed with stomach cancer, Kurosawa’s film is a serious contemplation of the nature of existence and the question of how we find meaning in our lives. Opening with a shot of an x-ray, showing the main character’s stomach, Ikiru, tells the tale of a dedicated, downtrodden civil servant who, diagnosed with a fatal cancer, learns to change his dull, unfulfilled existence, and suddenly discovers a zest for life. Plunging first into self-pity, then a bout of hedonistic pleasure-seeking on the frentic streets of post-war Tokyo, Watanabe - the film’s hero, finally finds satisfaction through building a children’s playground. In this, the role of his career, Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe, a senior civil servant sunk in ossified routine - a man who, as the dispassionate narrator tells us, has lived like a corpse for twenty-five years. Confronted with the news that he has terminal cancer with only months to live, he finds himself driven to give some meaning to his life. This was one of Kurosawa’s own favourites among his films. It grew, he said, out of a sense of his own mortality. Although he was only 42 and had yet to make most of his finest films, he was tormented with doubts about what his own life would be worth, saying, ‘I keep feeling I have lived so little. My heart aches with this feeling.’ From this angle, the film can be seen as a form of therapy, Kurosawa reassuring himself, and us, that life *can* be made to have meaning, even under the shadow of imminent death. As the critic Richard Brown wrote, Ikiru ‘consists of a restrained affirmation within the context of a giant negation. What it says in starkly lucid terms is that ‘life’ is meaningless when all’s said and done; at the same time one man’s life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task which is meaningful *to him*. What everyone else thinks about that man’s life is utterly beside the point, even ludicrous. The meaning of his life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be. There is nothing else.
Philip Kemp
Right here is my favorite sanctuary in Tokyo," said Ryuu. "It's called Momijidani. It means 'autumn leaf valley.'" We'd reached an artificial ravine with a waterfall tumbling down from a high rock formation about three stories tall, surrounded by a variety of rocks, and maple trees with red autumn leaves. A stream ran below the waterfall, with a picturesque bridge path over it. The effect was spectacular, like being deep in a valley surrounded by mountains- serene, private, magical- but with Tokyo Tower looming over it, a reminder of the bustling city just beyond.
Rachel Cohn (My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life)
A professional soldier with formidable powers of recall, after each cozy and informal chat with the Führer, Oshima compiled a detailed update on Hitler’s military thinking and planning, which was encrypted and sent by wireless, with German approval, to the Japanese Foreign Office. These reports were read with avid interest in Tokyo—and Washington and London.
Ben Macintyre (Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies)
Let me see… What’s your favourite Sherlock Holmes case?” “I love them all!” “Just choose one.” “OK… ‘The Speckled Band’. That was Arthur Conan Doyle’s own favourite, and it’s also his most popular story.” “Oh, that one! It’s the weirdest of all his cases! It’s a story about a snake, right? If you keep a snake in a safe, it will soon die from lack of oxygen. And suppose it does survive in the box: snakes don’t drink milk. Have you ever seen any reptiles breast-feeding their babies? Only mammals do that. And how about a man whistling for a snake? Actually snakes can’t be trained. They don’t have ears, so how can they respond to a man’s commands? It’s a matter of common sense. Was Holmes stupid or what? Since the incidents were so unrealistic, I have to assume the story was made up by Dr Watson.
Sōji Shimada (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders)
They said goodbye to Carita, who lay peacefully in a coffin full of rose petals, and watched her disappear behind the steel doors of the furnace. None of them was prepared for what came next. After a pause, they were led into a room on the other side of the building, and each given a pair of white gloves and chopsticks. In the room, on a steel sheet, were Carita's remains as they had emerged from the heat of the furnace. The incineration was incomplete. Wood, cloth, hair, and flesh had burned away, but the biggest bones, of the legs ans arms, as well as the skull, were cracked but recognizable. Rather than a neat box of ashes, the Ridgways were confronted with Carita's calcined skeleton. As the family, their task, a traditional part of every Japanese cremation, was to pick up her bones with the chopsticks and place them in the urn. "Rob couldn't handle it at all," Nigel said. "He thought we were monsters even to think of it. But perhaps it's because we were the parents, and she was our daughter... It sounds macabre, as I tell you about it now, but it didn't feel that way at the time. It was something emotional. It almost made me feel calmer. I felt as if we were looking after Carita." Nigel, Annette and Sam picked up the bigger bones and placed them in the urn with the ashes. The bigger pieces of the skull went on the top.
Richard Lloyd Parry (People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up)
Nothing better caught the complexity of Tim's own character, his stubborn unorthodoxy, which to me was so likable and admirable but which to many people was repellent. Almost on principle, he refused the obvious point of view and the temptations of conventional morality. The high ground was his for the taking, but instead of marching ahead to claim it, he dawdled and skirted around it, finding shades of pathos and ambiguity where others could see only black and white. Onlookers were not merely puzzled by this-they were appalled. Il Lucie Blackman's killing was not a straightforward example of good against evil, then what was? To be told by none other than her father that there was complexity here, to see Tim striving to be fair and sympathetic to his own daughter's killer undermined people's certainty in their own sense of right. They took Tim's lack of orthodoxy as an affront to their own. They identified him as a transgressor, almost a blasphemer, against acceptable ways of feeling.
Richard Lloyd Parry (People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up)
Lucie disappeared on Saturday, July 1, 2000, at the midpoint of the first year of the twenty-first century. It took a week for the news to reach the world at large. The first report appeared the following Sunday, July 9, when a British newspaper carried a short article about a missing tourist named “Lucy Blackman.” There were more detailed stories the next day in the British and Japanese papers.
Richard Lloyd Parry (People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up)
And then something comes over you, and then suddenly it’s as if you lift off the planet, and you’re far above, looking down, and you’ve got to find this person, like the needle in the proverbial haystack. It’s very strange. I could never express what that felt like. The feeling when you’ve lost something- that’s bad enough. But when you’ve lost someone, it’s awful.
Richard Lloyd Parry (People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up)
By the 1890s, New York was catching up with Chicago, and true skyscrapers were being erected. The city had the twenty-four-story St. Paul Building on Broadway at Fulton Street, and the twenty-six-story American Surety Building at 100 Broadway (the Bank of Tokyo Building in 1995, and still standing). By the end of the 1890s, New York City had the tallest skyscraper in the world, the now largely ignored Park Row Building at 15 Park Row—a 29-story building,
John Tauranac (The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark)
It’s just that I want her to open up to my version of fairy tales, my melancholy stories from Japanese folklore. Where the endings are often bittersweet—emphasis on the “bitter.” Where it’s possible for, say, a girl with a dead mom and a deadbeat dad to triumph somehow, even if it means casting aside idealized notions of love and turning into a monster.
Sarah Kuhn (From Little Tokyo, with Love)
Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their toes to fit into the glass slipper,” I fire back. “That’s the real story—not exactly happily ever after.
Sarah Kuhn (From Little Tokyo, with Love)
The product testers in Tokyo described the bug: "If you write a four-line memo and then backspace all the way over it, then write another line, then close the memo, and then repeat these steps several times, the memo won't be there.
Andrea Butter (Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry)
The buzz about the ball has risen to such a fever pitch that two weeks before the event those who had not received an invitation booked themselves a last-minute flight out of town—to Balesin or to Amanpulo or to Pangulasian in El Nido—or out of the country, Hong Kong or Singapore or as far as Tokyo.
A.A. Patawaran (Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official)
Certainly expatriate Japanese businessmen are never actually mentally in the country to which they are posted. They sit late in the office, taking into account the time differences, so that they can be on hand if the boss rings from Tokyo expecting to find them at the desk, literally day or night.
Rob Elliott (Don't Come Back! A True Love Story.)
Returning to Tokyo, Institute members concluded that Japan might win some initial battles, but it could not prevail in a long war against the United States. The United States had an industrial capacity twenty times that of Japan.
Dale A. Jenkins (Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway)
Another incident, which at first seemed unrelated to the K-129 loss, further complicated the developing life-and-death drama unfolding in the North Pacific. A Japanese spy, operating undercover near a U.S. Navy facility on Honshu Island, observed a damaged American submarine put into port on March 17. The American attack submarine USS Swordfish sailed into the huge U.S. Navy base at Yokosuka, needing repairs. The submarine was apparently not attempting to hide the damage to its conning tower, since it entered the navy yards at the mouth of Tokyo Bay, on the surface, in broad daylight.
Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)
Here in Tokyo’s neighborhood of secondhand bookstores is our little bookshop. It’s full of little stories. And it holds within its walls the thoughts and hopes and feelings of a great many people.
Satoshi Yagisawa (More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, #2))