Will Japan Love Cheap Toys and U.S. Recognize the Right to Survival? : JAPAN
“Toys R Us will have 100 shops open (in Japan) within 10 years, (because) cheap toys would be easier to sell to Japanese than hamburgers were a generation ago.”
--Den Fujita, vice chairman of the Japanese subsidiary of Toys R Us and president of McDonald’s Japan
“(Japanese children) don’t know how to be self-reliant. . . . Even when rice is being cooked, they don’t come and eat on their own accord: They wait for instructions.”
--Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who spent 30 years hiding in the Philippine jungle not knowing WWII was over
“Jusco Co., a major supermarket chain . . . decided to sell its popular discount shop in Seto City . . . because of too much illegal parking and traffic congestion caused by floods of customers. (The situation was) ‘unethical,’ ” a Jusco spokesman said.
--Item in Asahi Evening News
“He states that his wife, Takako, was his ‘hobby,’ and middle-aged women turned out in force for him.”
--Focus magazine analysis on why a Japanese politician won a landslide victory
“No American thinks dropping the atomic bomb was wrong, because they think it was inevitable. Japanese people think the same way about Pearl Harbor. Nobody feels sorry about Pearl Harbor.”
--Shinji Sudo of Kyoto Sangyo University
SINGAPORE
“I don’t see how the sale of one less toy is going to release political dissidents in China.”
--A Hong Kong buyer for a U.S. retailer criticizes boycott of made-in-China toys, in Straits Times
“Allowing Japan to once again send its forces abroad is like giving a chocolate liqueur to an alcoholic. Once the Japanese get off the wagon, it will be hard to stop them.”
--Former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew
“It is testimony to the subtle power of the Western media that it was not until the past year or two that I, when reading articles about Asia in Western publications, began to ask myself the obvious question: ‘If they can be so wrong so often about Singapore, why can’t they be more often wrong than right about other parts of Asia?”
--Commentary in Straits Times
TAIWAN
“This kind of attitude is truly worrisome.”
--United Daily News editorial on demand that George Bush apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki
“Americans tried to live beyond their means during the good, old days of President Reagan, and they must pay for it now.”
--China News editorial
“North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is unquestionably the current No. 1 threat to East Asian security and stability.”
--China News editorial
“This is almost like ‘repaying kindness with evil.’ ”
--United Daily News editorial on how Japan’s economic might was made possible by help from the Allies
CHINA
“ ‘Champions of human rights’ in the West . . . do not recognize the ‘right to survival’ as a human right, much less recognize it as the most important right. . . . Don’t belittle this right to survival. . . . In America, there are several tens of millions of people without enough to eat, without enough to wear and without personal security.”
--People’s Daily
