Celeb Quotes about Japan

[American Oyaji]

"My favorite sport is sumo wrestling and my favorite athlete is Akebono. I love sumo wrestling because I find the sport humane, honorable and entertaining with a great sense of tradition." ~Chaka Khan

Taken from the October 1992 issue of EBONY. Which incidentally was one month before I arrived in Japan.

I'm sure there are other celebrity comments about Japan. Post yours.

[Taro Toporific]

There is No Japan
--Jeon Yeook

"Japan does not exist. There is no such place. There are no such
people. It is a fabrication of the worst order."
--Oscar Wilde

and the full quote is....
Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gallery showed only too well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.

[Ptyx]

This is brilliant, it should be sent to every journalist that comes here to write a "story".
Fuck it, send it to everyone who ever had an interest in Japan for the wrong reasons.

[Charles]

[quote="Taro Toporific"]There is No Japan
--Jeon Yeook

"Japan does not exist. There is no such place. There are no such
people. It is a fabrication of the worst order."
--Oscar Wilde

and the full quote is....
Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people]

You remind me of one of my favorite bits of writing on Japan:

"Japan is a Rorschach Test."
-Nicholas Kristof

Well that's not an exact quote, but I still remember this, it is from Kristof's first column he wrote for the NY Times upon arriving in Japan, about 1993 or so. He went on at length about how anyone who went to Japan would see exactly what he was prepared to see, and nothing else. Thus, Japan is a Rorschach Test for the gaijin writer, a big blob of undifferentiated blur that is absolutely unintelligible on a rational level, so the writer ends up blathering about whatever crosses his mind. Any essay about Japan would always say more about the writer than about Japan, and thus were essentially useless as news coverage.
I've searched the archives of the NYTimes for this essay, and even before the archives changed to a paid service, the essay disappeared. I can only presume that Kristof thought it was an embarrassment and retracted it. It is not often that a writer says that everything he is about to write for the next few years is utter bullshit.

[dimwit]

[Doctor Stop]

“The only English words I saw in Japan were Sony and Mitsubishi.” - Bill Gullickson

[eighty5er]

“I do not think any reasonable person can doubt that in India, China and Japan, if the knowledge of birth control existed, the birthrate would fall very rapidly”

Bertrand Russell


Got that from the website dimwit linked to. He died in 1970 so considering he must have said this some time ago, I think he was really on the ball about Japan.

[dimwit]

The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them."

(Wilde, Oscar, "The Decay of Lying, An Observation", 1899)

[Neo-Rio]

I loved Japan. I used to read a lot about it when I was a child. And I always wanted to go. And it was delightful. I absolutely loved it. What a smashing place.

--Billy Connolly