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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 / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Oct 15, 2016
The audacity of trust: defying the dangers of life in Japan
I am a very trusting fellow. When I cross the street I trust the driver of the approaching vehicle to suppress whatever rage or hatred my appearance may inspire and not mow me down. I walk down the street trusting those within knife-range not to have a knife, or whoever has one not to be in the grip...
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Oct 15, 2016
Fifteenth-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa: Impotent or indifferent?
'The Creation of the Soul of Japan" is how Donald Keene, the eminent Japanologist, subtitled his 2003 biography of 15th-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. What is the soul of Japan? Tea, flowers, noh drama, simplicity, suggestiveness. War too — but Yoshimasa had no taste for war. No taste for power...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Oct 1, 2016
Who advises Japan's business leaders?
Take a wild guess: Who's the second most influential management guru in Japan, after — it almost goes without saying — Peter Drucker?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Sep 17, 2016
'Elderly terrorists' and 'hidden poverty' — Japan's new normal?
It's hard to read Spa! magazine without feeling that something is dreadfully wrong with Japan. Week after week, it pursues themes that soon grow familiar: hopeless poverty, pointless toil, unrelieved loneliness. In just one issue this month (Sept. 6) it tackles, in separate articles, "hidden poverty,"...
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Sep 17, 2016
The rise of a toxic machine named fascism
Why not fascism?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Sep 3, 2016
Building a stairway to the singularity
A computer's victory over a human go master this past March reminds us of the pending "singularity" — the rapidly approaching moment in time when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence. Machines will learn, and we won't be their teachers. Are we prepared for it? Can we prepare for it?...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 20, 2016
How to teach moral education in a relative age?
The wartime moral ideal was blind obedience and self-sacrificing devotion to the nation. Could the upgrading of moral education be a first step on the road back to that?
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Aug 20, 2016
An awakening gives birth to modern medicine
Illness we share with our ancestors. Diagnosis and remedies set us and them apart.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 13, 2016
A world gone mad? That's quite absurd!
Real life is getting too absurd for absurd theater — or so reckons one absurdist playwright. Does he have a point?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 23, 2016
A dark age dawns for politics in Japan
"Historic," that much-overused word, seems almost acceptable as a description of the Upper House elections earlier this month that gave Japan — for the first time in its postwar history — a government strong enough to get serious about rewriting the Constitution.
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Jul 16, 2016
'Zen's sudden awakening to the truth beyond reason, beyond language'
Rabbi Zusia tramped through his native Poland — this admittedly is an odd way of introducing a story about Zen — collecting money to ransom Jews unjustly imprisoned, victims of the rampant anti-Semitism then prevailing. At a wayside inn he saw birds in a cage. Zusia, simple soul that he was, promptly...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 9, 2016
Cracks are appearing in Japan's 'healthy' image
Few people snack on baby carrots. Most prefer the sweet, fat, high-calorie fare colloquially known as junk food.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 25, 2016
A confused, senile future awaits Japan
Confucius said: "When your parents are alive, serve them according to ritual. When they die, bury them according to ritual, make sacrifices to them according to ritual."
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Jun 18, 2016
Absolutism: an acceptable price to pay for order
His contemporaries hardly knew what to make of him. Their bewilderment is reflected in the name by which he is best known to us: the "dog shogun."
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 11, 2016
In Japan, all that is true melts into hot air
'Is it because the truth is so boring," asked the 14th-century monk Yoshida no Kenko in a classic collection of musings known as the "The Grasses of Idleness," "that most stories one hears are false?"
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
May 28, 2016
Poverty and boredom gnaw at Japan
Boredom, poverty and war: three themes you’d think (wrongly) would be extinct by now — war because humankind as a whole is more peaceably inclined than ever before, poverty because of an abundance of riches and boredom because ... doesn't it go without saying, given the endless stream, not to say...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
May 14, 2016
There's no escape from big data's eye
I am being watched. I am under surveillance. So are you. There are eyes on us, or maybe it's just one eye. Singular or plural, it is/they are ubiquitous, all-seeing. It/they never sleep(s). So much the better, for at least two reasons: 1) We are better protected, and 2) we are better informed.
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
May 14, 2016
Has pacifism always been doomed to fail in Japan?
Japan had a pacifist "constitution" long before 1947, when the current one went into effect. It was issued in the year 604, its author so esteemed, in his own time and since, as to merit the posthumous name Shotoku Taishi (Crown Prince Sage-Virtue). His lifetime (574-622) spanned an early phase of Japan's...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 30, 2016
Human primacy is go-ing, go-ing, gone
It is said of the ancient Chinese game go that the number of possible positions on its board exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 16, 2016
Can Japan make itself great again by 2050?
The bad news is, Japan is beset by seemingly insoluble problems. The good news is the word "seemingly." No nation whose rise to economic superpowerdom began a bare decade after being bombed to rubble in history's most destructive war will ever find anything truly "insoluble." Japan will astonish us yet....
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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