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April 08, 2025
 

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Michael Hoffman

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Michael Hoffman
Michael Hoffman is a fiction and nonfiction writer who has lived in Hokkaido by the sea almost as long as he can remember. He has been contributing regularly to The Japan Times for 10 years. His latest novel is "The Naked Ear" (VBW/Blackcover Books, 2012).
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 14, 2018
Japan faces up to the prospect of losing a middle-class war
Modern middle-class life, you could reasonably argue, generates more happiness among more people than any other ever conceived. It has been extravagantly derided — as bourgeois, soulless, spiritless, narrow, boring, mindlessly acquisitive and so on. But back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when...
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Apr 14, 2018
Ando Shoeki: He who dared anger the gods
A mind like Shoeki Ando — bold, mischievous, unconventional, borderline crackpot, one might almost say — is worth probing, if only for those qualities, let alone for his ideas, which leave the mainstream so far behind that the word 'evil' has been attached to him.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 31, 2018
Too much of an education could be bad for your future
While school rucksacks in Japan may be getting heavier, the prospects for the over-educated may be getting bleaker.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 24, 2018
World debates what action to take over North Korea
Nine years after then-U.S President Barack Obama committed America to the pursuit of "a world without nuclear weapons," nine months after the U.N. adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and five months after the Nobel Peace Prize Committee conferred one of the world's highest honors...
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Mar 17, 2018
Till death do us unite: Japan's dark tales of love
Has ever a civilized people lived in greater intimacy with death than the Japanese?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 10, 2018
Confusing power with powerlessness
"We're all terrified. It's like living in a mass grave." It's an underground shelter. "No water, no food, no ventilation, no toilets. Explosion after explosion. It never stops."
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Feb 24, 2018
What's to become of humanity when AI replaces us all?
Humanity is turning a corner. The signpost is marked "AI." Everyone knows what it stands for. Who knows what it means?
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Feb 17, 2018
Heroism and the changing state of morality
Every age breeds its own morality. One era's good is another's evil. Today's virtue is tomorrow's vice, today's wisdom tomorrow's stupidity, today's sanity tomorrow's madness.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Feb 10, 2018
Japan's impoverished are finding it hard to enjoy freedom
Freedom comes in many forms, as does "unfreedom." You can be a prisoner in prison, a prisoner in a prison-state, a prisoner in your job, a prisoner in your joblessness. Who is freer — a poor person in a free country, or a rich person in an "unfree" country?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jan 27, 2018
North Koreans express cynicism and enthusiasm over nuclear crisis
The fate of the world hangs on two volatile characters of doubtful sanity.
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Jan 20, 2018
On the adulteration of Japan's oldest religion
Primitive Shinto is one of the loveliest religions in the world. It's beautiful in its simplicity — defenseless too, as it proved, against the nativists and nationalists who warped it into 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century xenophobia.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jan 13, 2018
In a nation that favors so much, why are Japanese teens so glum?
The world's happiest teens live — no, not in Japan — in the Dominican Republic. It's a beautiful Caribbean country, much and justly beloved by tourists yet plagued by poverty, crime, child marriage, teen pregnancy and inadequate education. Tourists needn't worry about that, but local kids, you'd...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Dec 30, 2017
Who can we trust during these new wars of the world?
Swords into ploughshares. Spears into pruning hooks. Three thousand-odd years ago, when civilization was rough and passions raw, an extraordinary visionary saw peace dawning. His words, recorded in the Biblical book of Isaiah, transcend religious denomination and national affiliation. They belong to...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Dec 23, 2017
Men still making houses as women try to leave home
Dogen Ogata's name is known worldwide before he knows it himself. He's 8 months old. One day last month, in all innocence, cradled in his mother's arms, he attended a session of the Kumamoto municipal assembly.
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Dec 16, 2017
Japan's historical resistance to Christianity
Jesus and Japan go back a long way, longer than you'd think if you don't happen to know of a peculiar legend that has the Son of God sojourning — twice: once before, once after the crucifixion — in a remote mountain village in northern Aomori Prefecture.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Dec 9, 2017
Shut in by the past yet still unable to face the future
Mom, dad, two kids, nice house, nice suburb, good income — you just know this story is about to go smash.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Nov 25, 2017
The popularity of the psychopath is a mind puzzle
Psychopaths, says neuroscientist Nobuko Nakano in her 2016 bestseller "Saikopasu" ("Psychopaths"), tend to share two personality traits. Freedom from fear and anxiety is one. Indifference to other people's feelings is another.
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Nov 18, 2017
Japan's shifting attitudes toward prostitution
Sex is a necessity and a pleasure; it's also a problem. It exalts some, degrades others. It generates offspring. It's dynamite. Taboos concerning it are as old as humanity. Laws regulating it predate civilization. Nowhere is the human libido absolutely unfettered. Incest is nowhere tolerated, marriage...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Nov 11, 2017
On the quest for the holy grail for as long as we live
Is death inevitable? True, everyone born before Aug. 4, 1900, has proved mortal (the world's oldest-known living person, a Japanese woman named Nabi Tajima, was born on that date). But the past is only an imperfect guide to the future, as the effervescent present is ceaselessly teaching us.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Oct 28, 2017
Limit the damage on office battlefields
What a nest of vipers an office is! Tens, hundreds, thousands of people, supposedly united in a common enterprise — yet if looks could kill, how many would make it alive through the day?
Nissan says it will not take new U.S. orders for Mexican-built Infiniti SUVs
A Nissan manufacturing complex in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Nissan says it will not take new orders from the United States for two Mexican-built Infiniti SUVs following new auto tariffs levied by the U.S.
Why Japan is running out of rice — and farmers to grow it
An ongoing shortage of rice has resulted in rising prices for Japan's main food staple.
Nikkei plunges in third-biggest daily loss ever amid Trump tariff concerns
Pedestrians stand in front of an electronic board showing the numbers of the Nikkei Stock Average on the Tokyo Stock Exchange along a street in the Japanese capital on Monday.
Ride-hailing services spreading in Japan
Vehicles used for ride-hailing services in the city of Kiryu, in Gunma Prefecture
‘Let’s make it practical’: NATO chief eyes greater defense-industrial ties with Japan
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte plans to visit Japan on Tuesday and Wednesday — his first to the Indo-Pacific region since taking office in October, as he seeks to implement lessons from the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Tottori takes a bold leap forward in the arts
The city of Kurayoshi in Tottori Prefecture celebrated the opening of its public art museum with festivities such as a parade that drew 1,000 revelers.
Haruki Murakami TV adaptation revisits 30 years of watershed moments
Though Haruki Murakami's trademark whiff of offbeat existentialism is threaded throughout NHK's "After the Quake," the final episode — conceived as a sequel to the story "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" — is the most stylized, featuring an anthropomorphic talking frog (voiced by Non) and his erstwhile associate Katagiri (Koichi Sato).
Nintendo to launch the Switch 2 on June 5
The controllers for the Switch 2 will attach to the console magnetically rather than sliding on rails as with the original device.
A new human trafficking trend emerges from Myanmar scam centers
Victims of scam centers who were tricked or trafficked into working in Myanmar gather at a compound inside KK Park, a fraud center on the country's border with Thailand, after a multinational crackdown in February.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

An ongoing shortage of rice has resulted in rising prices for Japan's main food staple.
Why Japan is running out of rice — and farmers to grow it
By Alex K.T. Martin

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