Shintaro Ishihara

Attributed

• Regarding the Rape of Nanjing: "They say we made a holocaust there, but that is not true. It is a lie made up by the Chinese."
• About himself: "I’m an existentialist--freedom and passion are the most important things to me. I was horribly disappointed when I learned that Sartre was a Communist."
• On political parties: "A party is a political tool. If it's no longer useful, it should be crumpled up and thrown away."
• On the status of politicians in Japan: "in Japan people avoid going into politics. I was really looked down on in literary circles [when I went into politics]."
• Regarding the famous novelist Yukio Mishima: "Japan is not the same since with him gone, but his politics were a joke."
• About the United States: "Fifty years of subservience to the interest of the United States has deprived the Japanese of a national purpose and engendered a paralyzing identity crisis." [After all, Japan] "is the only non-Caucasian society to have created a modern superpower."
• In response to China's first successful launch of a man in space: "The Chinese are ignorant, so they are overjoyed. That spacecraft was an outdated one. If Japan wanted to do it, we could do it in one year."
• “Let them bomb Japan with that nasty missile. Their missile cannot load a nuclear warhead.”

• Regarding the bomb-planting at the private residence of Deputy Foreign Minister Hitoshi Tanaka: "A bomb was planted there. I think it was deserved."
• Regarding a war between China and the United States: "Wars are a war of attrition of lives. China holds no value at all for human life and can start a war without any concerns...If tensions mount between the United States and China, the two sides could pull the trigger on each other. Then, the more the fire expands, the United States, which has a civil society that highly values human life, would not be able to win." Ishihara: Life-respecting U.S. no match in war against China