Yen Japanese Quotes

After purifying himself he walked through a small red gate to the shrine, dropped a goen, or five yen coin, the Japanese word for which also means good luck, into the wooden collection box in front of the shrine.

facts matter a great deal. What a patient does for a living, what his background is, what level of education he has achieved…all of these issues must be addressed in great detail in order to put his complaints and his disease in the proper context. If I ask a man to take the square root of 100 and he cannot, I might take this as proof of a left-hemispheric brain tumor, unless I know that he has worked on a farm since childhood and never attended school. Likewise, I might find it normal that a patient could not tell me the current exchange rate of the pound in Japanese yen. But if I knew that person was a merchant banker, on the other hand, ignorance of this fact would indicate a grave illness indeed! Americans have grown so dependent upon their scanning toys that they fail to view the patient as a multidimensional person. To have the audacity to cut into a person’s brain without the slightest clue of his life, his occupation…I find that most simply appalling.” These

There she sat with her rust-flecked sides and her new hood and her tailfins that seemed a thousand miles long. A dinosaur from the dark ditty-bop days of the 50s when all the oil millionaires were from Texas and the Yankee dollar was kicking the shit out of the Japanese yen instead of the other way around.

Until age 24 or so, I lived with my girlfriend in a 15,000-yen apartment in Yamagata. The people around us were kind and would give us fruits and vegetables. So while we didn't have much, I think we ate a well-balanced diet. Even though we were poor, we had a pet Japanese rice fish. I found it dead one summer. I went to toss its body in the trash like in Parasyte, but my girlfriend said she wanted me to bury it, so I went off into the park, alone. I tried to bury it under this big tree, but the ground was too hard, my hands got all dirty, and I had no hole to show for my effort. Out of options, I figured I would pretend I had buried the fish and left it lying there on top of the ground. As I watched it for a little while, ants found the body and began trying to carry it away. I'm not sure what came over me, but in that moment, love for the pet fish welled from within me for the first time. I brushed the ants away, and then I ate it. The next day I had an upset stomach. And when my girlfriend suggested it was something I'd eaten, I came up with some lie cover up the fact that I'd eaten our pet fish. I've had people get mad at me many times throughout my life, and when I'm scared of that, the lies just spill out. Most of the time I get caught in them, but this time I didn't. That brings us to now. The memory of lying to my girlfriend is far stronger than the guilt of eating our pet fish. Please allow me to confess my sin here.

When you visit Gindaco, spend some time watching the cooks make takoyaki before ordering, because it's an amazing free show. The shop has an industrial-sized takoyaki griddle with dozens of hot cast iron wells, each one about an inch and a half in diameter. The cook squirts the grill with plenty of vegetable oil. She dunks a pitcher into a barrel of pancake batter and sloshes it over the grill, then strews the whole area with negi, ginger, and huge, tender octopus chunks. Some of Gindaco's purple tentacles are two inches long. This cooks for a little while, then the cook tops off the grill with more batter until it's nearly full. Up to this point, the process looks haphazard, but then she whips out the skewers. Using only the same slender bamboo skewers you'd use for making kebabs, she begins slicing through the batter in a grid pattern and forming a ball in each well. Somehow she herds this ocean of batter into a grid of takoyaki in a minute or two. The takoyaki cost all of 500 yen, and the price includes a wooden serving boat that you can take home and reuse as a bath toy if you haven't gotten too much sauce on it. A Gindaco takoyaki is a brilliant morsel: full of flavor from the negi and ginger, crispy on the outside and juicy within. Takoyaki also stay mouth-searingly hot inside for longer than you can stand to wait, so be careful.

When I came here, Porcupine was the first to treat me to ice water. To be treated by such a fellow, even if it is so trifling a thing as ice water, affects my honor. I had only one glass then and had him pay only one sen and a half. But one sen or half sen, I shall not die in peace if I accept a favor from a swindler. I will pay it back tomorrow when I go to the school. I borrowed three yen from Kiyo. That three yen is not paid yet to-day, though it is five years since. Not that I could not pay, but that I did not want to. Kiyo never looks to my pocket thinking I shall pay it back by-the-bye. Not by any means. I myself do not expect to fulfill cold obligation like a stranger by meditating on returning it. The more I worry about paying it back, the more I may be doubting the honest heart of Kiyo. It would be the same as traducing her pure mind. I have not paid her back that three yen not because I regard her lightly, but because I regard her as part of myself. Kiyo and Porcupine cannot be compared, of course, but whether it be ice water or tea, the fact that I accept another’s favor without saying anything is an act of good-will, taking the other on his par value, as a decent fellow. Instead of chipping in my share, and settling each account, to receive munificence with grateful mind is an acknowledgment which no amount of money can purchase

Back then, Japan as a nation aspired to something in which each individual seemed invested. And that "something"wasn't just about economic growth, or transforming the yen into an international currency. It had more to do with accessing information. Information was indispensable, and not only as a means of obtaining necessities like food and clothing and medicine. Within two or three years of World War II's end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depended on it. Why? To create a more abundant life? If so, where was the abundance? Where were the luxurious living spaces? Eyesores dominated the scenery wherever you went, and people still crammed themselves into packed commuter trains each morning, submitting to conditions that would be fatal for any other mammal. Apparently what the Japanese wanted wasn't a better life, but more things. And things, of course, were a form of information. But as things became readily available and information began to flow smoothly, the original aspiration got lost in the shuffle. People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

The owner of the coal mines, Baron Takaharu Mitsui (1900–1983), a graduate of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and world famous as a philatelist, was head of one of the two most powerful industrial families in Japan (along with Mitsubishi), and among the wealthiest men in the country. His mines produced half of its coal, though those at Omuta had been closed down in the 1920s as unsafe. He was well aware of the work and living conditions of the POWs, having visited the camp several times in his open touring car. Like other companies that used Allied prisoners as slave labor—Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, Kawasaki—Mitsui paid the Japanese army a leasing fee per prisoner of two yen per day (above the average Japanese daily income), and the army kept the money. Though the prisoners were supposedly being paid a wage that was a minuscule fraction of this, very few ever received anything.

At the time, it cost 1,000 yen to build a house in Japan, and Kinu had spent 936 yen on tickets. Their single trip was virtually one house, but her remaining funds would go far in Hiroshima.

As the economy collapses prices remain high. This is, I guess, very Japanese. In some other countries there would be at least a few merchants who would lower their expectations. Not here, however. There are new alternatives (the hundred-yen malls), but nothing established lowers anything. Perhaps it is because quality is judged by price. If you lower the price you lessen the quality. There is thus really no such thing as a bargain. Indeed, some raise their prices as though to tempt through exceptional quality—this is the way Wako Department Store works. The goods are in no way exceptional, but the prices are. Consequently anything merely wrapped in Wako paper is first-rate. I remember tales that in the far hinterlands people used to paper their walls with Tokyo department store paper, simply to give tone.

a thorough and all-encompassing decoupling from China would require from companies making such a move an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in newly located factories, and from governments equivalent amounts to fund new infrastructure, like airports, transportation links and housing, to serve the relocated supply chains. Notwithstanding that the political desire for decoupling may in some cases be stronger than the actual ability to do so, the direction of the trend is nonetheless clear. The Japanese government made this obvious when it set aside 243 billion of its 108 trillion Japanese yen rescue package to help Japanese companies pull their operations out of China. On multiple occasions, the US administration has hinted at similar measures.

Is this a potato? It's so smooth! It doesn't have that muddy, earthy smell to it! It's not fluffy or dry, and it just melts away in my mouth!" "This is 'potato stewed in butter.' It's a dish I learned from Ajihyakusen, an izakaya in Sapporo. For the soup, you use the ichiban-dashi of a katsuobushi. That way you won't waste the scent of the potato. And for ten potatoes, you place half a pound of salted butter into the dashi... ...flavor it with a very slight amount of salt and sugar, and stew it over extremely low heat. In about forty minutes, the potatoes will start to float in the dashi. If you keep boiling the potatoes, they'll sink again and then come floating back up in two and a half hours. All you need to do after that is to boil it for about thirty more minutes, and it's done." "Then you boil it for almost four hours total?" "Right. It takes a whole day to cook this, so even though this dish only costs 600 yen, you have to order at least a day in advance to eat it at the izakaya. The dishes Kurita and I made the other day were all made to your order. They were dishes that avoided the true nature of the potato. But this is a dish that draws out the full taste of the potato in a very straightforward way. By cooking the potato for several hours over low heat, the flavor of the potato seeps out into the dashi, and when that happens, the unique muddy smell of the potato disappears. The potato can be easily broken apart in the soup, and it melts away on your tongue." "That's the biggest difference from the other potato dishes." "You can taste the true flavor of the potato with it.

On a whim, I bought a Japanese textbook that cost two thousand yen. The language in it was so old that it ended up feeling surprisingly fresh.

The Chinese renminbi was fixed against the dollar from July of 2005 until June 2009. With a fixed exchange rate, a currency’s value is matched to the value of another single currency or to a basket of other currencies. So when a country pegs its currency to the dollar, the value of the currency rises and falls with the dollar. This action helped China survive the global financial crisis. But China removed the dollar peg after the global financial crisis ended last year. Meanwhile, Japan has also seen the value of the yen grow stronger. With the U.S. economy continuing to lag and growing fiscal uncertainty in European countries, the yen has continued to gain strength because it was the only currency that was stable. So countries like China expanded their purchases of the yen, resulting in the yen’s appreciation. As the yen continued to rise against the dollar, the Japanese government intervened in the currency market in September for the first time since March 2004. This is not the first global currency war the world has seen. In 1985, the finance ministers of West Germany, France, the U.S., Japan and the UK gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York to sign the Plaza Accord. Under the deal, the countries agreed to bring down the U.S. dollar exchange rate in relation to the Japanese yen and German mark. As the recent currency war continues to spread around the globe, some countries are now saying that there is a need for a new Plaza Accord to stabilize the world economy and the global financial market.

A long-term temperament as well as long-term circumstances A Japanese man went into a bank to change some Japanese notes into sterling. He was surprised at how little he got. “Please explain,” he said to the cashier. “Yesterday I was changing same yen for sterling and I received many more sterling. Why is this?” The cashier shrugged his shoulders. “Fluctuations,” he explained. The Japanese man was aghast. “And fluck you bloody Europeans too,” he responded, grabbed the notes, and walked out. Fluctuations matter if the money could be needed soon. Money invested in equities must not be money which will be wanted in a year or two, or might be urgently wanted at any time, because there is a fair chance that the moment when it is needed will be a bad one for the stock market and the investor will therefore be selling at low prices. If investors think they might need the money soon, the message is clearly stay away: the chance of a minus return is just too great. Even if investors are in a position to allocate a fair amount to equities, they should not necessarily do so. It is not enough that the circumstances are right. Investors need to be temperamentally inclined to the sort of long-term investment which equities are. Long-termness must be subjective as well as objective. The fact that the circumstances of a particular investor might objectively lead to a certain viewpoint does not mean that he or she necessarily has that viewpoint. A baby is in an objective position to take a long-term view, but will not actually look beyond the next feeding-time.

suppose they began to worry about the health of the Japanese currency, the yen, in which bonds are denominated and in which the interest is paid. In such circumstances, the price of the bond would drop as nervous investors sold off their holdings. Buyers would only be found at a price low enough to compensate them for the increased risk of a Japanese default or currency depreciation.

If you hit a hole in one when playing golf in Japan, you should know that it is customary to throw a lavish celebration for your friends. Don’t worry if the cost of this is worrying you though, as you could join the four million Japanese citizens who have taken out ‘hole-in-one insurance’, covering them for half a million Yen.

She looks at me in astonishment. ‘Manchuria is gone. Japan is paralysed! Now China and Japan do not have a diplomatic relationship. So, no one accepts the Japanese yen!

Then in 1883 a major drought seared the landscape and wiped out millions of yen worth of rice and other crops, only to be followed in 1884 by a major storm that caused widespread flooding and destroyed still more crops.

It also became the most profitable movie in Japanese history, despite its budget of almost 2 billion yen (equivalent to $17.5 million at the time and $25.2 million in today’s money).

In general, a weak currency is good for exporters and punishing for importers. In 1992, when the U.S. dollar was relatively weak, a New York Times story began, “The declining dollar has turned the world’s wealthiest economy into the Filene’s basement of industrial countries.”4 A strong dollar has the opposite effect. In 2001, when the dollar was strong by historical standards, a Wall Street Journal headline proclaimed, “G.M. Official Says Dollar Is Too Strong for U.S. Companies.” When the Japanese yen appreciates against the dollar by a single yen, a seemingly tiny amount given that the current exchange rate is one dollar to 90 yen, Toyota’s annual operating earnings fall by $450 million.