About the United States: 'Fifty years of subservience to the interest of the United States has deprived the Japanese of a national purpose and engendered a paralyzing identity crisis.' [After all, Japan] 'is the only non-Caucasian society to have created a modern superpower.'

Regarding the famous novelist Yukio Mishima: 'Japan is not the same since with him gone, but his politics were a joke.'

In response to China's first successful launch of a man in space: 'The Chinese are ignorant, so they are overjoyed. That spacecraft was an outdated one. If Jap…

On the status of politicians in Japan: 'in Japan people avoid going into politics. I was really looked down on in literary circles [when I went into politics].'