Bending Adversity Quotes

“Fujiwara blamed Japan’s descent into militarism on its abandonment of samurai values and its embrace of prevailing western thought. In its quest to become a Great Power, it aped the colonial ways of that other island nation, Britain, he said. ‘I always say Japan should be extraordinary; it should not be an ordinary country. We became a normal country, just like other big nations. That’s all right for them. But we have to be isolated, especially mentally. For the past 200 years, after the industrial revolution, westerners relied too much on logical thinking. Even now, they tend to think that, if you really depend on logic and reason, then everything will be all right. But I don’t think so. You really need something more. You might say that Christianity is something that can come on top of those things. But for us Japanese, we don’t have a religion like Christianity or Islam. So we need to have something else – deep emotion. That is something we have had for twenty centuries.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Japan's 'stakeholder' capitalism, which has similarities with continental Europe, is a legitimate policy option. The Anglo-Saxon model, which favours capital above labour, has sometimes helped investors at the cost of higher unemployment.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Some countries look 'richer' in aggregate merely because their population has grown. But unless growth outstrips population increase, individuals don't feel better off. So, if we're interested in standard of living rather than investor returns, we should look at growth on a per capita basis.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Japan's pre-war success, its emulation of the west, is not simply industry, it's not simply culture. Westernization also means imperialism.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Japan's modernisation has proved what was once unthinkable to Europeans, whose colonialism was built on racist theories: non-whites could not match or even surpass western nations.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Sake is about what's not there...it's like in speech. The pauses and the silences, the things that aren't there give a hint of the meaning. The most elegant sakes are barley there at all.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Perhaps striking an appropriate balance between stakeholder and shareholder capitalism is a legitimate matter for debate in any democratic society.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Japanese society used to be characterized as very top down. But we have learned that we can survive without a leader.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“A country we often think of as strong collectively but weak individually had shown itself to be the exact reverse. Japan, it turned out, was a nation of strong individuals and a weak state. Japan is a country of good soldiers but poor commanders.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“We should reflect on our responsibility as individuals in a democratic society,’ he [Kurokawa] said of the collective failure at Fukushima. That meant strengthening hat he called ‘civil society’. Viewed in this light, Kurokawa’s remarks were not a case of letting people off the hook. They were a call to individual and collective action.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“To pin the blame on culture is the ultimate cop-out.’ The culture of collusion inside the ‘nuclear village’ was hardly unique to Japan, Curtis [Gerry Curtis expert on Japan, Columbia university] continued. Hadn’t there been pretty much the same collusion in the US between bankers and their regulators, who turned a blind eye as some of the country’s biggest financial institutions led the nation towards the brink of financial ruin? If Japanese culture put the interests of the organization above the interests of the public, Curtis concluded, ‘then we are all Japanese”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Kurokawa blamed the disaster not on particular individuals but rather on Japan’s entire culture. ‘This was a disaster “Made in Japan”, ‘ he said. ‘Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to “sticking with the programme”; our groupism and our insularity.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Our psyche is very insular. But we always see ourselves reflected in the mirror outside.’ That struck me [David Pilling] as a perfect summation of the Japanese paradox – and the root of some of its tragic missteps. Because of its insularity, Japan’s only way to understanding itself has been with reference to other nations.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“We committed acts of aggression in the continent and we need to study these in detail and leave the results to posterity. Political leaders had ‘failed to grasp’ the need to dig into Japan’s past and squarely face up to it.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Japan was not the easiest society to be the odd one out, she [Hiroko Arai] said. She thought the older teachers were more rebellious than the younger ones for whom the war was more distant. Unlike the generation after the war, younger Japanese had been taught to be more obedient. ‘I didn’t want to educate them to be so obedient. I wanted them to be critical of authority.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“My [Hiroko Arai] favourite phrase is “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”,’ she told me, quoting Thomas Jefferson. That meant standing up – or in her case sitting down – for what you believed in. When the Hinomaru flag was raised she remained resolutely stuck to her seat. As a punishment for her refusal to honour the national symbol, the school board forced Arai into early retirement with a reduced pension. She was also obliged to attend a ‘re-education seminar’ at which, she said, she was monitored y officials who noted her every reaction on a multi-coloured form. ‘During the Second World War, the Hinomaru flag and the Kimigayo became symbols of what we did,’ she said of Japan’s invasion of China and Southeast Asia. ‘I can’t show respect to these symbols.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“No sooner do the Japanese say sorry, goes the complaint, than someone on the right undermines it by denying, or even glorifying, Japan’s wartime behaviour. Part of the problem is that Japan is a democracy where people, in and out of government, are free to say what they like. Japan will never stop its wartime apologists, just as Germany cannot hope to silence its neo-Nazis. But conservatives and nationalists have tended to dominate the discourse in Japan, overshadowing the statements and actions the discourse in Japan, overshadowing the statements and actions of many Japanese who have sought to look at history more squarely. As a result, the revisionist view of history is often seen by Japan’s critics as the true sentiments of its people, normally hidden by revealed after a few glasses of sake or in the company of fellow Japanese.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Japan has never been able to put its past behind it. That is partly because it suits its neighbours to play the ‘history card’ by keeping the past alive. Governments in China and South Korea have become adept at switching on old hatreds when it suits them. But Japan’s patchy record on facing up to its past has given them plenty of ammunition.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“The existence of hostess bars is one of the reasons that Japanese men and women don’t get along,’ she [Natsuo Kirino] said. ‘You see, there are women who will perform services for men, pour their drinks, light their cigarettes. And at home, wives will cater to their husbands’ needs. There is a separation of roles, of being kind to men in two different settings. So men feel that, as long as they pay, they will receive service in such places. And when they go home, they will receive service from their wives. Japan is truly a kind of men’s paradise.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Many of the young women who work in such places are not desperately poor, but university students seeking extra spending money. Kirino said there were fewer taboos about such things in Japan than in the US. But unlike some, who regard the Americans are too puritanical, she was not happy about the Japanese situation at all. ‘The way the sex industry exists in Japan is something that really upsets me, especially when teenage girls are exploited. Some people say: “Oh no. They love to go and work in that industry.” But when I hear that, my heart is crushed.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Many Japanese guys hate it when the woman does better or has a better label. The younger career women at work are finding it very difficult to find boyfriends and future marriage prospects. Japanese men had told me [David Pilling] something similar. One said, ‘There’s a preference for the traditional type of female. Men are not so confident in themselves these says, so the purpose women who are shorter than they are, who earn less than they do and who are less accomplished than them. There’s not much of a market for overachievers.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“I can’t say unequivocally that Japanese women are oppressed or not oppressed. In hidden places, Japanese women always had power, it’s true. All Japanese men also have a tendency to suffer from mazacon,’ she [Natsuo Kirino] added, using the contraction of ‘mother complex’ to refer to the obsessive devotion men are said to harbour for their mothers. ‘That’s why Japanese women are seemingly rather strong … You talked about running the household accounts. But this means that men don’t have to worry about how much to save. They are relieved of such worries. Once you get married, it is not a case of man and wife, but man and mother.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“It used to be that women could not make a living without a man. Now that’s changed and men have to be attractive to get a woman. For many younger Japanese, the shift in power relations meant better, more equal relationships. Many married couples over fifty had a less-than-ideal setup. ‘They husband played at making money, the wife at being a mother. It’s very different from forming a real partnership.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“The virtue and talent of Japanese women used to be seen as their ability to have everything go their own way without saying a word. But that is not enough anymore. They have to start making noise.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Women have always had control of the purse strings and had responsibility for running everything smoothly. Japanese men have been incredibly reliant on the female of the species, no knowing where anything is, not knowing how to dress. Without women they would have to go around naked. There has always been a depth to Japanese women behind the silk screen. There was never that much of an idea of being the protected, pampered species put on a pedestal in the sort of “ladies are gods” culture that predominated in medieval Europe or in Victorian times.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Japan’s most neglected resource is its women. In a country with no oil, gas, or precious minerals, national prosperity is almost entirely predicated on the diligence and ingenuity of its people. But social conventions have suppressed the potential of half Japan’s population.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Men are almost like slaves in the corporate world and Japanese women are contained within the household. Their lives are disconnected. That is one of the sources of this boiling rage.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“She [Natsuo Kirino] drills into Japan’s more rancid layers in the years after the collapse of the economic bubble. There she discovers seams of poverty, violence, rage, and depravity in a society that mostly sees itself as refined and orderly.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“I don’t know what they should call my generation. Maybe the tough generation. Certainly not the happy generation.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Living has become too hard.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival