Pragyaa Jain

“I could either abandon the doubts I beheld and be free, or else dwell in the eye of the prejudiced, to be chained there. There are too many enemies in life to be one of yourself.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“OK, so more fascinating discoveries. This one thanks to Yujiro Hashi. There was a time when the Japanese equivalent for ‘the whole world’ was ‘the three countries.’ So, instead of saying ‘You are the most beautiful person in the whole world,’ they would have said, ‘You are the most beautiful person in the three countries,’ although the import would be the same. The fascinating part is that the three countries referred to are Japan itself, China and India. That was the whole world according to the Japanese mental map of the time. The phrase (now antiquated) is: san goku ichi no xxx, i.e. ‘the best xxx in the three countries (whole world). San goku ichi no hana-yom or the most beautiful bride in the world, is an expression still used at weddings.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“Until moving to Japan, I’d tended to feel that if my interlocutor didn’t talk, she was expressing her boredom. But I was coming around to becoming cautiously appreciative of what, to a talkative Indian like me, was the ‘peculiar’ Japanese ease with silence.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“Suzuki concurred, positing that Japan’s particular character in intellectual life did not lie in ‘the richness of ideas, or brilliance in articulation’, but in staying ‘quietly content’, feeling ‘at home in the world’.35”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan