I'm Japanese, but restaurants in my hometown served the most sanitized versions of California rolls. I grew up eating a lot of Japanese food at home that my parents or grandparents made.
I don't have an inspiration, I don't have a role model. I like to meet different people and gain something from their experiences and their lives. I take inspiration and worth through what they've gone through. I don't have one person I look up to always, apart from the person that I am, if that makes sense. I just look up to the person that I was yesterday and I just try to better myself whichever way I can.
I love big shrimp, like Japanese botan shrimp and the meaty ones from Santa Barbara, Calif. In classic Japanese cooking, shrimp like these would be dropped into a broth or boiled as served with sushi. But I think boiling dilutes their great flavor, and they are better when stir-fried.
There was just a moment when I fell in love with singing, probably when I started listening to Ben Howard and his album 'I Forget Where We Were.' I fell in love with that album, and that album really made me fall in love with singing.
Unlike the Japanese internment, water-boarding was ordered and served up in secret. But it, too, was America's policy, not just Dick Cheney's. Congress was informed about what was happening and raised no objection. The public knew, too.
People love destroying mankind, for some strange reason. You make a movie about mankind's destruction, you're going to fill seats. People just love the idea. For a couple thousand years, we've been dreaming up how we're all going to disappear and fade away from this planet.
It's just endless what you can learn from a single work of art. You can fill up the crevices of your life, the cracks of your life, the places where the mortar comes out and falls away-you can fill it up with the love of art.
Japanese music was so crazy! The J-pop and everything. I never scooped up an album or anything.
An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.
I love how you can shoot a movie in a month or two or three of four, and it's this encapsulated story that you box up and ship out into the world, and what it is, is what it is.
I've had quite a lot of bad experiences with Japanese sweets. I reckon, Japanese...they can do most things really well but sweets, they're a bit dodgy.
I didn't fill it up with movies every time because I was trying to just film one damn movie, but that's the heartache of independent films.
There's only so much room in one heart. You can fill it up with love or you can fill it with resentment. But every bit of resentment you hold takes space away from the love. And the resentment don't do no good noway, but look what love can do.
We made our debut in Japan about few years ago and when we went on a morning show there to promote our album, I did a brief interview in Japanese using simple expressions such as "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu." But one of the members of our group said, "Stay quiet if you can't speak Japanese! It's embarrassing!" So that's when I told myself that I'd show how good I am by studying Japanese hard.
I just fell in love with his music. I thought Yanni was Japanese. I didn't have any idea what a Yanni was. I just thought I was in love with a Japanese man who wrote beautiful music.
I don't speak Japanese, I don't know anything about Japanese business or Japanese culture. Apart from sushi. But I can't exactly go up to him and say "Sushi!" out of the blue. It would be like going up to a top American businessman and saying, "T-bone steak!