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September 17, 2024
 

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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 / History
May 17, 2014
Wrong to judge early imperialist Japan too harshly?
"Korea turned out to be this nice, laid-back place..."
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
May 10, 2014
Convenience stores give our nation pride
Japan's prime minister is an unabashed patriot, as outspoken in his love for his country as in his desire to instill that love in his compatriots. Are his compatriots receptive? Opinion polls on attitudes toward pending revisions of long-standing interpretations of the pacifist Constitution, prologue...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 26, 2014
Mini-revolutions may add up to a change
1949. The war was over. Slowly, a numbed populace rose from the dead. That year, 2.7 million babies were born — a record high, never surpassed.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 19, 2014
How should a civilized nation treat women?
In 1872, a Peruvian ship transporting Chinese coolies docked at Yokohama for repairs. One of the coolies jumped overboard and sought refuge, complaining of gross ill-treatment. What to do?
JAPAN / History
Apr 19, 2014
Taking a maiden stab at expansionism in Taiwan
Taiwan is Japan's forgotten colony.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 12, 2014
'Big Pharma' manipulating the market? Now that's depressing
You're the entrepreneurial type, let's say, ambitious but a little unsure of yourself. What field is ripe for your energy and enthusiasm?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 29, 2014
The truth is, we have gotten too used to lying
Philosophers love truth — that's a truism. What about the rest of us? Do we love truth or falsehood? Truth, we naturally affirm. So why are we swimming in falsehood?
JAPAN / History
Mar 22, 2014
The sloughing of Japan's corporate skin goes on
"Man is born free and is everywhere in chains."
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media
Mar 15, 2014
Japan's future may be stunted by its past
Is time carrying us forward, or backward?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 1, 2014
Why marry, or worry, when we can be alone together in ohitorisama Japan?
As people increasingly choose to live and do things alone, is Japan evolving into an 'ohitorisama' nation? Time will tell.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Feb 15, 2014
A tale of two Abes: PM's rosy view jars with life of toil seen in poison case
Did the frozen-food poisoner have some obscure notion of 'justice' in mind? Might it have been his way of saying to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, 'Japan is not back; Japan won't be back until working for a living does not entail the sacrifice of all human dignity
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Feb 15, 2014
Once upon a time, China anointed a 'King of Japan'
In 1401, barely a century after the Mongols' aborted invasions of Japan, and 600-odd years before Japan and China fell out over the Senkaku islets, a Chinese emperor conferred upon a Japanese shogun the title "King of Japan."
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Feb 1, 2014
Pursuit of happiness
The merry residents of Japan have long sought to attain the 'pleasantest of all diversions
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Feb 1, 2014
For Japan's foreign residents, the little things make such a big difference
American political ideals may be grander, European philosophy may be deeper, Islamic faith may be firmer than anything native to Japan — but Japan, perhaps uniquely, knows the value of small things.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jan 25, 2014
Age brings no respite from hard times for the 'lost generation'
Poverty is a relative term. As with age, you're as poor as you feel. Affluence brings with it rising expectations. Failure to meet them feeds the psychology, if not the dire physical deprivation, of poverty.
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Jan 18, 2014
In Jomon and Heian, the times weren't a-changin'
"Man the change-maker." That is one definition of Homo sapiens. Other creatures are changed — by Nature, by evolution — over vast expanses of time measured in hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Humankind consciously generates change. We innovate, build, invent, destroy, build again. Even...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jan 11, 2014
Children are blank slates for truth, or propaganda
Imagine you are a parent whose child is being taught propaganda. What do you do? Teach your children the truth and watch their grades slip as they lose interest in school? Or turn a blind eye, knowing their future careers will depend on their grades?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Dec 28, 2013
There's a cloud above our silver generation
Travel back with me, reader, 60 years in time. It's 1953. Two booms are in full swing: one economic, the other reproductive; the first fueled largely by the Korean War, the second, in part, by the first. Among the 2 million babies born in Japan that year — nearly twice as many as were born this year...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Dec 14, 2013
Society struggles to adapt to post-privacy age
Individuals are visible as never before, and democratic governments, reeling from successive exposures of state secrets, are struggling desperately to withdraw into the shadows. No democracy has gone further in that direction than Japan under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Dec 14, 2013
Why didn't Japan have a revolution like France's?
Why wasn't there a revolution in Japan like the one in France? The suffering was as great in 18th-century Japan as in the realm of ill-fated King Louis XVI, the government here as callous and incompetent as the government there. How did Japan's old order — rotting internally, as its collapse under...
Japan's elderly population grows to record 36.25 million
The proportion of people aged 65 and over has risen since the 1950s and is expected to hit 34.8% by 2040, when the second baby boomers (born 1971-1974) will join that group.
'Shogun' becomes first non-English-language winner of best drama Emmy
Japanese actress Anna Sawai, winner of the outstanding lead actress in a drama series award for "Shogun," and Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada, winner of the outstanding lead actor in a drama series award for the show, pose in the press room during the 76th Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday.
Japan jumps to No. 2, from sixth place, in Best Countries index
Pedestrians cross an intersection in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Japan has experienced a postpandemic travel boom, with tourists pouring back in after restrictions closed the country’s borders to travelers.
South Korea is facing deepfake porn crisis
Activists hold up symbolic eye masks during a protest against deepfake porn in Seoul on Aug. 30.
Second assassination attempt on Trump is latest jolt in chaotic campaign
U.S. Secret Service and Homeland Security agents check a former home of a Ryan Routh, a suspect in an alleged assassination attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump, in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Sunday.
‘Shogun’ and the painstaking art of ‘getting it right’
Hiroyuki Sanada and the cast and crew of "Shogun" accept the award for best drama series at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California.
Japan’s schools battle to keep kids cool, with or without AC
Students sit under a misting system during recess at Hikarigaoka Haru no Kaze Elementary School in Nerima Ward, Tokyo, on Sept. 6.
Chris Broad's new bar puts cocktails first, YouTube second
A self-proclaimed lover of great cocktails, YouTuber Chris Broad says his new Shibuya watering hole is more a place to get yourself a solid drink than it is anything related to his social media career.
In LDP presidential poll, three kingmakers hold all the cards
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks at the Liberal Democratic Party headquarters in Tokyo in January as former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga (left) looks on.
How China’s dominance of solar and batteries is impacting Japan’s energy transition
Solar panels and wind turbines at a power plant in Hami in China's Xinjiang region. The U.S. and other countries have described China’s actions against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, a key cog in the cleantech supply chain, as a genocidal campaign aimed at erasing an entire culture.

Podcast

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

Longform

A store clerk tries to cool things down in front of their shop by spraying a hose.
Is extreme weather changing the way Japan shops?
By Alex K.T. Martin

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