Japan

it seems you have been influenced by director Akira Kurosawa. MIYAZAKI: I love director Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Even though I love it, the Japan that he depicts in that film is not the real Japan. My perception of Japanese history is different. That is why I felt I needed to make my own period drama with historical Japan as the setting, and

To identify your ikigai, ask yourself these four questions: ● What do you love? ● What are you good at? ● What does the world need right now? ● What can you get paid for?

It’s like one of those Greek tragedy masks in a textbook that’s half one idea and half the opposite. Light and dark. Hope and despair. Laughter and sadness. Trust and loneliness.

in Japan—where the population is forecast to fall from 127 million to 100 million or lower by 2049—one in every eight properties are already abandoned, forecast to rise to nearly a third of all housing stock by 2033. (The Japanese call them akiya, ghost homes.)

When we keep others waiting, we are not being respectful of their lives. And time is the most precious commodity that any of us have.

Though the child is one’s own, he or she is not living to satisfy one’s expectations as a parent.