A Quote by Arthur Golden
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
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I recently wrote a piece on comics in architecture - I was talking about the three kinds of comics I pay attention to: the Franco-Belgian, the Japanese manga, and the American comics. I started thinking about the relationship between Japanese manga and Japanese architecture, or Franco-Belgian bande dessinée versus Franco-Belgian architecture, it began to make sense; there are parallels to the modes of operations and the cultures they belong to. If I didn't force myself to write, I would have no forum to clarify these thoughts. Writing is really helpful.
Inside the polling booth every American man and woman stands as the equal of every other American man and woman. There they have no superiors. There they have no masters save their own minds and consciences.
If you're Japanese and you signed up for Pinterest in Japan, you see Japanese ideas, not American ideas that look Japanese - it's a very big difference.
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.
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!
The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.
They didn't incarcerate the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii. That's the place that was bombed. But the Japanese-American population was about 45 percent of the island of Hawaii. And if they extracted those Japanese-Americans, the economy would have collapsed. But on the mainland, we were thinly spread out up and down the West Coast.
American women today want too much liberty; that's why they're unhappy. Because when an American man meets a woman, he treats her like a pal instead of a woman.
Since I am a Japanese man who's been building through the experience of Japanese architecture, my actual designs come from Japanese architectural concepts, although they're based on Western methods and materials.
What I would note, though, and one of the things I really admire about the vice president: She is the first African American woman, woman of color, Indian American woman to serve in this job. Woman. I mean, so many firsts, right? It's a lot to have on your shoulders.
The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.
If a CEO takes an interest in you and he happens to be an Asian man, then that's great, but as an African-American woman, you want to make sure that if the executive vice-president of the company is an African-American woman that you get to know her.
There aren't many American directors here trying to direct a Japanese yakuza film. When you combine that with the fact that I don't speak much Japanese and this was an independent film I was financing myself - people were curious about what I was doing.
From woman, man is born; within woman, man is conceived; to woman he is engaged and married. Woman becomes his friend; through woman, the future generations come. When his woman dies, he seeks another woman; to woman he is bound. So why call her bad? From her, kings are born. From woman, woman is born; without woman, there would be no one at all.
I'm a first-generation American. My parents are from Nigeria. I had this weird last name that looked Japanese, and then people would see me and go, 'Oh. You're not Japanese.'
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