rising above

"Being at Takeda´s " I told them, taught me an important lesson early in my life. That while it was right to look up to teachers, it was always important to question their authority. The Takeda experience taught me never to follow the crowd blindly, but to consider carefully the direction in which I was being pushed. And if there´s one thing I´ve tried to encourage to you all to do, it´s been to rise above the sway of things. To rise under the undesirable and decadent influences that have swamped us and have done so much to weaken the fibre of our nation these past ten, fifteen years."

An artist of the floating world - Kazuo Ishiguro