“It was great because I was able to reevaluate myself as a Japanese” common remarks after foreign holidays, according to George Fields in “From Bonsai to Levis” (1983)

“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.” Edward Seidensticker in “Low City High City“

“A willingness, and indeed a wish, to believe the worst about Koreans has been a consistent theme in modern Japanese culture” Edward Seidensticker in “Low City High City”

“The world believes Japan’s politicians are unable to decide on anything, not even to put one foot in front of the other”

Tadamori Oshima, the LDP’s Diet-affairs chairman, quoted in The Economist, Jan 2008