The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.

It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.

Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries.

There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.

The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher.

To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man.

However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.

If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.

Merin smiled. "I fought in battle and your mother bore two children. Of the two of us, I think she was the courageous one.

If there had once been a chance and there had once been love, then it will still be there in spite of time and obstacles. If you can get past that, you can get past a lot.

She wanted us to have more than five choices. Now we have none.

I looked up my family tree and found out I was the sap.

I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

I really can't watch myself. I just get too in my head about it and start overthinking everything.

Tips for a long life - Keep Sweet, Keep Friendly, Keep Loving, if ye would... keep Y O U N G

Satan . . . is as dangerous as we allow him to be. His primary weapon is deceit, and he uses it to prevent Christians from exercising the authority that is truly theirs in this world.

Almost all the moral good which is left among us is the apparent effect of physical evil.

A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.