Quotes

In Tottori, where I was first posted, my job was to play the trumpet. I couldn't play it, so I was forced to run around the grounds all the time. It was so tough. I asked my trumpet unit boss how I could be released from the assignment, and he told me to ask the head of the personnel unit. So I went to the personnel unit, and the officer there asked me: "Which would you prefer, South or North?" When I said South, I was sent to Rabaul [then a major Japanese wartime garrison]. If I had played the trumpet without complaining, I could have stayed on in Japan. Because I was a whiner, I was sent overseas.

Japan should've cool-headedly observed the United States. We didn't have a deep understanding of what the U.S. meant, its national strength, and instead kept our perception vague. We had this weird illusion that we could win the war with just our yamatodamashi [Japanese spirit], paying only a little attention to the material aspects of the war. We were punished for that. The high-ranking officials relied too much on the trivial stuff like spirituality. National strength and material power are much bigger things than that - but we only learned that after losing the war.

People tend to scorn people who sleep a lot, and we have the expression, damin wo musaboru [literally, "sleep lazily," but actually meaning, "idling your time away"], but that's not good. Sleep is important - for your health, your brain, everything. I slept so much that I kept missing the morning classes in school, but sleeping well and living long is not bad at all.

When I was little, I didn't do things except things I was interested in. Things that adults would be impressed at seeing, I never did. I would ignore directions from adults, unlike my elder and younger brothers, who listened to them. I missed the first class every day, because I couldn't get up early in the morning. So I scored zero in math tests, because math classes were held the first thing in the morning and I skipped virtually all those classes. So I was called an idiot all the time. Still, I wouldn't listen to what adults said; instead, I carried on doing what I liked - drawing.

About losing his arm: The moment I was hit, the pain was so fierce that I shrieked - but then the next moment, I forgot everything. People say that when you are bombed, time becomes frozen, and the place turns into a vacuum. Your memory is temporarily lost, and you go into a different world when the bombing takes place right by you.

Outside of the world we know, there exist a hundred thousand other very strange worlds.

I have been the same ever since I was 4 or 5.

Electricity is dangerous. Not many people say this, but it's absolutely the electricity that made yokai vanish. Monsters prospered in the pre-electricity days, when people used andon (a standing lantern with a wooden frame and paper shade) and oil lamps. Electricity was too bright for yokai to survive.