Famous designers think nothing of putting their names on your clothing, but would have the servants set the dogs on you if you ever tried to put your name on their clothing.

The Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful strategy to dominate the U S consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese eat, sleep, and breathe golf; the only thing they don't do is actually play it, because to get on a course, you have to make a reservation roughly 137 years in advance, which means that by the time you actually get to the first tee you are deceased. Of course, in golf this is not really a handicap.

Tokyo is huge. Something like 15 million people live there, and my estimate is that at any given moment, 14.7 million of them are lost.

All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?

I have read that, on the average, the Japanese are getting taller, but at the moment they seem to be about the same height as American junior-high-school students, only with fewer guns.

Flying from the United States to Tokyo takes approximately as long as law school.

Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc.

The method (of learning Japanese) recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan. And even then it's not easy.