“For Saigo, as for all Japanese warriors from time immemorial, there were only two honorable ways to die: in battle or by one’s own hand with calmness and ritual. To die otherwise would mean terrible, insupportable shame throughout eternity, an awful karma brought into the next life, or, far worse, carried into the infinity of limbo.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“A century ago, when Admiral Perry’s American fleet opened the nation, Japan was a feudal society. The Japanese realized they had to change, and they did. Starting in the 1860s, they brought in thousands of Western specialists to advise them on how to change their government and their industries. The entire society underwent a revolution. There was a second convulsion, equally dramatic, after World War II.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Japan is not a Western industrial state; it is organized quite differently. And the Japanese have invented a new kind of trade – adversarial trade, trade like war, trade intended to wipe out the competition – which America has failed to understand for several decades.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Sooner or later, the United States must come to grips with the fact that Japan has become the leading industrial nation in the world. The Japanese have the longest lifespam. They have the highest employment, the highest literacy, the smallest gap between rich and poor. Their manufactured products have the highest quality. They have the best food.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“And living in Japan… I just got tired, after a while, of the way things worked. I got tired of seeing women move to the other side of the street when they saw me walking toward them at night. I got tired of noticing that the last two seats to be occupied on the subway were the ones on either side of me. I got tired of the airline stewardess asking Japanese passengers if they minded sitting next to a gaijin, assuming that I couldn’t understand what they were saying because they were speaking Japanese. I got tired of the exclusion, the subtle patronizing, the jokes behind my back. I got tired of being a nigger.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Most people who lived in Japan come away with mixed feelings. In many ways, the Japanese are wonderful people. They’re hardworking, intelligent, and humorous. They have real integrity. They are also the most racist people on the planet. That’s why they’re always accusing everybody else of racism. They’re so prejudiced, they assume everybody else must be, too.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Americans don’t understand. Because the Japanese system is fundamentally different.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Since 1987, there have been a hundred and eighty American high-tech and electronics companies bought by the Japanese.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“You probably know that their Zen monks are expected to write a poem close to the moment of death. It’s a very traditional art form, and the most famous poems are still quoted hundreds of years later. So you can imagine, there’s a lot of pressure on a Zen roshi when he knows he’s nearing death and everyone expects him to come up with a great poem.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“They have very sophisticated mapping software. It’s by far the most advanced in the world. The Japanese are becoming much better in software. Soon they will surpass the Americans in that, as they already have in computers.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“In Japan, the land where everyone is supposedly equal, no one speaks on burakumin. But before a marriage, a young man’s family will check the family history of the bride, to be sure there are no burakumin in the past. The bride’s family will do the same. And if there is any doubt, the marriage will not occur. The burakumin are the untouchables of Japan. The outcasts, the lowest of the low. They are the descendants of tanners and leather workers, which in Buddhism is unclean.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“You know, if you wanted to buy a Japanese company, you couldn’t do it. The people in the company would consider it shameful to be taken over by foreigners. It would be a disgrace. They would never allow it.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“It means the Japanese are exquisitely sensitive to the group. More than anything, they are attuned to getting along with the group. It means not standing out, not taking a chance, not being too individualistic. It also means not necessarily insisting on truth. The Japanese have very little faith in truth. It strikes them as cold and abstract. It’s like a mother whose son is accused of a crime. She doesn’t care much about the truth. She cares more about her son. The same with the Japanese. To the Japanese, the important thing is relationship between people. That’s the real truth. The factual truth is unimportant.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“It took a long time to understand that Japanese behavior is based on values of a farm village. You hear a lot about samurai and feudalism, but deep down, the Japanese are farmers. And if you lived in a farm village and you displeased the other villagers, you were banished. And that meant you died, because no other village would take in a troublemaker. So. Displease the group and you die. That’s the way they see it.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“The Japanese are masters of indirect action. It’s their instinctual way to proceed. If someone in Japan is unhappy with you, they never tell you to your face. They tell your friend, your associate, your boss. In such a way the words gets back. The Japanese have all these ways of indirect communication. That’s why they socialize so much, play so much golf, go drinking in karaoke bars. They need these extra channels of communication because they can’t come out and say what’s on their minds. It’s tremendously inefficient, when you think about it. Wasteful of time and money. But since they cannot confront – because confrontation is almost like death, it makes them sweat and panic – they have no other choice. Japan is the land of the end run. They never go up the middle… So behavior that seems sneaky and cowardly to Americans is just standard operating procedure to Japanese.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“The Japanese are masters of the smear job.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“In the last twenty years, Japan cut the energy cost of finished goods by sixty percent. America has done nothing. Japan can now make goods cheaper than we can, because Japan has pushed investment in energy-efficient technology. Conservation is competitive.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Basically, the Japanese have an understanding based on centuries of shared culture, and they are able to communicate feelings without words. It’s the closeness that exists in America between a parent and child – a child often understands everything, just from a parent’s glance. But Americans don’t rely on unspoken communication as a general rule, and the Japanese do. It is as if all Japanese are members of the same family, and they can communicate without words. To a Japanese, silences have meaning.’

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Relationships are your source of information, your safety valve, and your early warning system. In the Japanese way of seeing the world.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“The Japanese can be tough. They say ‘business is war,’ and they mean it. You know how Japan is always telling us that their markets are open. Well, in the old days, if a Japanese bought an American car, he got audited by the government. So pretty soon, nobody bought an American car. The officials shrug: what can they do? Their market is open: they can’t help it if nobody wants an American car. The obstructions are endless. Every imported car has to be individually tested on the dock to make sure it complies with exhaust-emission law. Foreign drugs can only be tested in Japanese laboratories on Japanese nationals. Foreign skis were once banned because Japanese snow was said to be wetter than European and American snow.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun