Quotessence
Home / Topics / Japanese Quotes

Japanese Quotes

Browse 157 quotes about Japanese.

Japanese Quotes

“Main ingredients: rice, distilled alcohol, brewing saccharides...' what's that all mean?" "During the second World War, something called sanbaizōshu was created as a way to make sake from a small very small amount of rice." "'Sanbaizōshu'?" "Essentially, you take sake made the proper way but then dilute it until it's three times its original volume. Besides water, the main additive is distilled grain alcohol, followed by malt syrup, glucose, and MSG to fix the flavor." "What? You add a completely different alcohol that wasn't created during the brewing?!" "Monosodium glutamate? I can't believe they'd add such a thing to a drink!" "You're right. This isn't real sake. Although we now have an abundant supply of rice, the big beverage companies still make sanbaizōshu since it's an easy way for them to make a profit." "But I trusted them because they're popular brands..." "It's the other way around. Most of the large companies with huge advertising campaigns on TV and whatnot use this method." "Then what about this bottle with "Junmaishu" on it?" "It's from a small brewery in the countryside, a sake made from nothing but rice, kōji, and water. This is the kind of sake that should have an ingredient label so that people can see that it's truly pure. It's a tragedy that we have it the other way around here in Japan. Is there any other country in the world that's degraded their traditional drink like this?It's an important part of our culture and it's almost been destroyed.”

“White people love you, don't they? They only like me. They think I'm a dainty little china doll with bound feet, a geisha who's ready to please. But I don't talk enough for them to love me, or at least I don't talk the right way. I can't put on the whole sukiyaki-and-sayonara show they love, the chopsticks in the hair kind of mumbo jumbo, all that Suzie Wong bullshit, like every white man who comes along is William Holden or Marlon Brando, even if he looks like Mickey Rooney.”

“I like the relaxed way in which the Japanese approach religion. I think of myself as basically a moral person, but I'm definitely not religious, and I'm very tired of the preachiness and obsession with other people's behavior characteristic of many religious people in the United States. As far as I could tell, there's nothing preachy about Buddhism. I was in a lot of temples, and I still don't know what Buddhists believe, except that at one point Kunio said 'If you do bad things, you will be reborn as an ox.' This makes as much sense to me as anything I ever heard from, for example, the Reverend Pat Robertson.”