Vertical Japanese Quotes

When it comes to storage, vertical is best.

Judgment” is a word that comes out of vertical relationships. If one is building horizontal relationships, there will be words of more straightforward gratitude and respect and joy.

The initial result of this dynamic, quite clearly, is a rapid development of the traits of concentration within American imperialism. The simultaneously political and economic control over other countries exercised by U. S. finance capital; the increasing role of the American State in the establishment of this control; the direct stranglehold over German, Japanese, and Italian capital; the acceleration of vertical and horizontal concentration imposed by the need to control and regulate more and more completely its sources of raw materials and its domestic as well as foreign markets; the expansion of its military apparatus, the likelihood of "total" war, and a war economy; the need for increased exploitation of the working class imposed by the falling rate of profit — all these factors drive the American economy beyond capitalism "run by the monopolies" (just as these monopolies went beyond the stage of competitive capitalism) in order to arrive at the stage of a universal monopoly that is identical with the State. A new crisis of overproduction -more acute even than the present crisis- but, above all, war, will signal an extraordinary acceleration of this process.

yokomeshi [yo-ko-meh-shee] (noun) As an untranslatable, this one ranks high on my list of favorites. I could not improve on the background given by commentator Boyé Lafayette de Mente about this beautiful word, yokomeshi. Taken literally, meshi means "boiled rice" and yoko means "horizontal," so combined you get "a meal eaten sideways" This is how the Japanese define the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language: yoko is a humorous reference to the fact that Japanese is normally written vertically, whereas most foreign languages are written horizontally. How do English-speakers describe the headache of communicating in an alien tongue? I don't think we can, at least not with as much ease.

As with Japanese keiretsu, the member firms in a Korean chaebol own shares in each other and tend to collaborate with each other on what is often a nonprice basis. The Korean chaebol differs from the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or postwar keiretsu, however, in a number of significant ways. First and perhaps most important, Korean network organizations were not centered around a private bank or other financial institution in the way the Japanese keiretsu are.8 This is because Korean commercial banks were all state owned until their privatization in the early 1970s, while Korean industrial firms were prohibited by law from acquiring more than an eight percent equity stake in any bank. The large Japanese city banks that were at the core of the postwar keiretsu worked closely with the Finance Ministry, of course, through the process of overloaning (i.e., providing subsidized credit), but the Korean chaebol were controlled by the government in a much more direct way through the latter’s ownership of the banking system. Thus, the networks that emerged more or less spontaneously in Japan were created much more deliberately as the result of government policy in Korea. A second difference is that the Korean chaebol resemble the Japanese intermarket keiretsu more than the vertical ones (see p. 197). That is, each of the large chaebol groups has holdings in very different sectors, from heavy manufacturing and electronics to textiles, insurance, and retail. As Korean manufacturers grew and branched out into related businesses, they started to pull suppliers and subcontractors into their networks. But these relationships resembled simple vertical integration more than the relational contracting that links Japanese suppliers with assemblers. The elaborate multitiered supplier networks of a Japanese parent firm like Toyota do not have ready counterparts in Korea.9

Chinese family businesses instinctively thought of ways of hiding income from the tax collector. The situation is quite different in Japan, where the family is weaker and individuals are pulled in different directions by the various vertical authority structures standing above them. The entire Japanese nation, with the emperor at the top, is, in a sense, the ie of all ies, and calls forth a degree of moral obligation and emotional attachment that the Chinese emperor never enjoyed. Unlike the Japanese, the Chinese have had less of a we-against-them attitude toward outsiders and are much more likely to identify with family, lineage, or region as with nation. The dark side to the Japanese sense of nationalism and proclivity to trust one another is their lack of trust for people who are not Japanese. The problems faced by non-Japanese living in Japan, such as the sizable Korean community, have been widely noted. Distrust of non-Japanese is also evident in the practices of many Japanese multinationals operating in other countries. While aspects of the Japanese lean manufacturing system have been imported with great success into the United States, Japanese transplants have been much less successful integrating into local American supplier networks. Japanese auto companies building assembly plants in the United States, for example, have tended to bring over with them the suppliers in their network organizations from Japan. According to one study, some ninety percent of the parts for Japanese cars assembled in America come from Japan or from subsidiaries of Japanese companies in America.43 This is perhaps predictable given the cultural differences between the Japanese assembler and the American subcontractor but has understandably led to hard feelings between the two. To take another example, while Japanese multinationals have hired a great number of native executives to run their overseas businesses, these people are seldom treated like executives at the same level in Japan. An American working for a subdivision of a Japanese company in the United States might aspire to rise within that organization but is very unlikely to be asked to move to Tokyo or even to a higher post outside the United States.44 There are exceptions. Sony America, for example, with its largely American staff, is highly autonomous and often influences its parent in Japan. But by and large, the Japanese radius of trust can be fully extended only to other Japanese.

Do you mean that one has to choose one or the other—vertical relationships or horizontal relationships? PHILOSOPHER: Absolutely, yes. If you are building even one vertical relationship with someone, before you even notice what is happening, you will be treating all your interpersonal relations as vertical.

It does not matter if one is trying to walk in front of others or walk behind them. It is as if we are moving through a flat space that has no vertical axis. We do not walk in order to compete with someone. It is in trying to progress past who one is now that there is value.

If I died in a freak accident while hurrying through Shibuya's notorious "scramble" intersection, where thousands of pedestrians crossed from all directions at once when the WALK light shifted to green, I hoped whoever performed my funeral service would know I died satisfied. Shibuya felt like being in the center of the vertical world, with tall buildings flashing advertisements, neon lights, and level after level of stores and restaurants visible through glass windows. So many people, so hurried, so much to look at and experience. Fashionista women wearing skinny pants with stiletto pumps riding bikes down crowded sidewalks. Harajuku girls with pink hair and crazy outfits. Loud izakaya bars where men's conversations and laughter spilled onto the street, and women walking by wearing kimonos with white socks tucked into flip-flops. Young people strutting around dressed in kosupure ("cosplay," Nik translated) outfits from their favorite anime, like it was Halloween every day here. TOO MUCH FUN. I didn't want to die, but if I did, I would tell the souls I met in the afterlife: Don't feel bad about my premature end. I saw it all in my short time down in the upworld of Tokyo.

YOUTH: Let’s change the question. All people are equal. They’re on the same level playing field. But actually, there’s a disparity here, isn’t there? Those who move forward are superior, and those who pursue them from behind are inferior. So we end up at the problem of superior and inferior, don’t we? PHILOSOPHER: No, we do not. It does not matter if one is trying to walk in front of others or walk behind them. It is as if we are moving through a flat space that has no vertical axis. We do not walk in order to compete with someone. It is in trying to progress past who one is now that there is value.

when things are stored vertically, any increase takes up space and you will eventually run out of storage area. When you do, you’ll notice, “Ah, I’m starting to accumulate stuff again.

I recommend storing vertically anything that can be stood up.