With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001 we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese Danish and Germans.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature I just wanted to do something else.

I have to express sympathy from the bottom of my heart to those people who were taken as wartime comfort women. As a human being I would like to express my sympathies and also as prime minister of Japan I need to apologize to them.

Since I have come to America I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come but while living in America I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic Chinese Japanese Korean or Russian combined.

English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.

I had to trick people into giving me money for my first film. Making a romantic comedy is easier and more expected from a woman than it is to make a drama about a Japanese warrior.

I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form.

You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect Japan is first Europe is second and we're third.

I'd had a relationship with a French girl a Japanese girl an American girl a Filippina and she was there all the time - a Lancashire girl. I thought: 'It's a Lancashire girl I was looking for. Why didn't I realize it?'