Quote Japan
Interesting, odd, outrageous or informative quotes about JapanEdward Seidensticker- Quotes from High City Low City
“Among the rumors that went flying around the city was the imaginative one that an unnamed country of the West had developed an eathquake machine and was experimenting upon Japan. There were,nevertheless, no outbreaks of violence against.. westerners. Instead..,the nation turned on Koreans. The government urged restraint .. because the Western world might disapprove.”
“A willingness, and indeed a wish, to believe the worst about Koreans has been a consistent theme in modern Japanese culture”
“The city was proud of its fires, which were called Edo no Hana – and occured so frequently and burned so freely that no house in the low city could expect to last more thn 2 decades”
This could perhaps explain how a culture that now means few houses survive more than two decades for other reasons developed.
“In the years after the Second World War, one was frequently surprised to hear from the presumably fortunate resident of an unbombed pocket that he would have been happier if it too had been bombed”
All quotes above from High City Low City, a highly recommended history of Tokyo.
