And of course in the Philippines there were so many thousands of Americans that were captured by the Japanese and held and who were rescued by Filipino Americans or Filipinos I should say and by U.S. troops near the close of the war.

I'm old enough to remember the end of World War II. On Aug. 14 1946 a year after the Japanese were defeated most newspapers and magazines had single articles commemorating the end of the war.

My mother lived in Holland and during World War II was incarcerated in a Japanese camp for three years.

I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II.

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war I would have been tried as a war criminal.

Yesterday December seventh 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

When I grew up in Taiwan the Korean War was seen as a good war where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was of course the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that.

My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.

India and Japan should develop a complementary relationship in information technology.

Working in Hollywood it's clear the more money you have the more technology you can get. So you can build a whole Japanese set. Only in Hollywood!

With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001 we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese Danish and Germans.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature I just wanted to do something else.

I have to express sympathy from the bottom of my heart to those people who were taken as wartime comfort women. As a human being I would like to express my sympathies and also as prime minister of Japan I need to apologize to them.

Since I have come to America I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come but while living in America I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic Chinese Japanese Korean or Russian combined.

English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.

I had to trick people into giving me money for my first film. Making a romantic comedy is easier and more expected from a woman than it is to make a drama about a Japanese warrior.

I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form.

You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect Japan is first Europe is second and we're third.

I'd had a relationship with a French girl a Japanese girl an American girl a Filippina and she was there all the time - a Lancashire girl. I thought: 'It's a Lancashire girl I was looking for. Why didn't I realize it?'

For decades Japan has been a friend and reliable trading partner with the United States and I anticipate that relationship will prosper.

But in Japanese there's actually not much of a relationship between the music and the words.

Many Japanese painters and calligraphers would change their names intentionally to keep their relationship to the art always fresh. This way others' expectations can be avoided.

As I grew up I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.