Yasuo Quotes

Often we may even smile or laugh at adversity, but all people share the same passions. They are merely manifest differently according to one's culture and conditioning.

Be resolved that honor is heavier than the mountains and death lighter than the feather.

Seek only to preserve life -- your own and those of others. Life alone is sacred.

Second Lieutenant Yasuo Ko’o, devised a morbid system that estimated a man’s life expectancy by his ability to stand or sit. If a man could stand, he might live thirty days; if he could sit up, three weeks; if he could only lie down, one week. If he urinated lying down, he had three days to live; if he stopped speaking, two days; and if he stopped blinking, just one day.18

One starts from the experiential assumption that the mind-body modality changes through the training of the mind and body by means of cultivation (shugyo) or training (1ceiko). Only after assuming this experiential ground does one ask what the mind-body relation is. That is, the mind-body issue is not simply a theoretical speculation but it is originally a practical, lived experience (taiken), involving the mustering of one's whole mind and body. The theoretical is only a reflection on this lived experience.

The Sojo is indeed a man of miracles... but he's not an almighty god that controls fate. Fate is something ordinary people like us create for ourselves. That's why it means so much.

But two dozen of them were sent quietly to Cat Island, a small uninhabited speck of sand, brush, sloughs, and alligators, just two miles offshore from Gulfport, Mississippi. There they spent three months creeping through bushes and swamps, hunted by dogs being trained to detect what someone in the army brass thought was the unique scent of the Japanese. When a dog happened across one of the nisei boys, a guard fired a shot in the air, the Nisei soldier dropped to the ground and played dead, and a piece of meat was thrown on the ground in front of him. The dogs inevitably ate the meat licked the soldiers' faces, and wagged their tails enthusiastically. As one of the soldiers, Yasuo Takata, remembered, 'We didn't smell Japanese, We were Americans. Even the dogs knew that.