Japan
Japanophile~
Japan
“I wanted to tell you what was going on, but I just couldn’t find the words.” “But wouldn’t we have arrived at the same place, anyway?”
Haruki Murakami • Men Without Women: Stories
A great story about simplicity from Akio Morita, the instigator of the Walkman project at Sony:
Engineers had the technology to add the recording function to the Walkman and it would’ve cost only 50 cents to a dollar per unit. Morita decided against it. He wanted the device to have one function, which it performs very well. Walkman should only play
each of us is a member of a community, and that is where we belong. Feeling that one has one’s own place of refuge within the community, feeling that “it’s okay to be here,” and having a sense of belonging—these are basic human desires.
Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga • The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness
Koga Hirano
btob.bookandsons.com
“Well, we use words to communicate, right? Still, most of our words don’t actually get across. You know what I mean? Well, our words might, but not what we’re actually trying to say. That’s what we’re always dealing with. We live in this place, in this world, where we can share our words but not our thoughts.
Mieko Kawakami • Breasts and Eggs
Kaizen is a state of continuous improvement where people naturally look for ways to improve poorly performing practices.