"For those who had to go out and face them on the tatami, the new techniques were perplexing enough in themselves, but they were executed by unnervingly fit, highly-trained atheletes possessed by a desparate hunger to win."

"For a man who had an unbroken string of victories since he was nineteen, each successive contest added a little more pressure upon him. He could never relax for a moment. Every opponent that he faced, from a no-hoper to serious contender wanted to go down in the record books as The Man Who Stopped Yamashita."

"Many gods came to our temple over the years and I always tried to get a practice with them. For me it was a sort of autograph hunting and I enjoyed the privilege of seeing their artistry at such close quaters- of being the brush with which they painted their mastery."

"It was the upper-body strength of the westerners that really worries the Japanese. At the core of the problem faced by the Japanese was a fundamental difference between the eastern and western physique."