Quotes

Quotes from old men who look after me

"Mexicans are really smart. Do you know why? Because they're relatively pure-blooded. Koreans are smart, right? Chinese are smart, right? Blacks are smart, Japanese are smart. It's because they're blood isn't mixed. When you start mixing blood, things get weird."

"The quality of Japanese people has gone down since the end of the war. There aren't very many good people in Japan anymore. There were a lot before the war, but now, there are very few good Japanese people."

"Japanese people are becoming stupider and stupider. They barely even read books anymore, and just read manga all the time now, even full-grown adults."

"Japanese are different than they used to be before the war. Just last week, a 2nd year middle school boy was almost killed by three 3rd year boys. They just started beating him up, and luckily someone came by and saved him. Everybody watches variety shows that just make fun of people, anyone who's heavyset, or small, or old. Kids watch these shows and come to school and just make fun of each other and put each other down. In Osaka, you hear about young people beating up and killing homeless people all the time. The Japanese have become a people who pick on those who are weaker than them."

"You know how young Japanese people all dye their hair brown now? It's because they wish they could be like Westerners."

"Mexican women are really beautiful. You know why? It's because they're all mixed-blood. People with mixed-blood are really good-looking."

"As a Japanese, it really makes you feel good to hear that someone decided to study Japanese not because they saw some anime and thought the girls in it were cute or something, but because they thought the language itself was beautiful."

"The thing about Japanese is that if one person starts doing something, everybody else will start doing it too, until the whole country is doing it. It's part of the way we are. There have been good cases of it, Japan took in a lot of good ideas from other countries that way, but there are also bad cases. Young women only started dying their hair brown and trying to look more Western about ten years ago. Before then, no one was doing that. But all it takes is for it to become popular with one small group of people and everyone else who sees them will think they should do it, too. That's why so many people in Japan dye their hair."

"Whenever I hear him speak English, it sounds so cool to me."
"That's because that's how Japanese have been raised to think since the war. That's MacArthur's doing."

"The girls here are close to what women used to be like in Japan."

"It might be bad for me to tell you after you've come all this way and studied Japanese so much, but you should study Chinese. The future is in China. Japan's just going to continue going downhill from here. Economically, that is. Culturally, it'll keep cultivating itself - that's what happens in harsh economic times."

"I'm looking forward to seeing where you go from here."