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November 22, 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 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 Times
CULTURE / Books
Nov 30, 2013
The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan
Misfits. Oddballs. Bohemians. In Tokugawa Japan? Yes indeed, a veritable plethora of them. The Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1867) was hardly the first repressive regime, or the last, to throw nonconformity out the front door only to find it creeping in through the back door, through the window, through cracks...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Nov 30, 2013
Delving into the dark side of longer life
Longevity is like prosperity — it seems an unalloyed good but on closer examination turns out not to be. Longevity spawns dementia, infirmity, loneliness and a demographic imbalance favoring the very old at the expense of the young.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Nov 16, 2013
Paths to pay dirt are many and varied
Even stupid people can make money,' Spa magazine declares, in a package of articles aimed at the generation that the long-deflated Japanese economy has failed.
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Nov 16, 2013
Japan's 'world of peace' sold out to mammon
Suppose Confucianism had prevailed? We'd have "rites and music" instead of law; filial piety instead of democracy and free-market capitalism. The ruler would radiate paternal benevolence and we, his subject-children, would respond with respect and obedience. Would we be worse off?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Nov 2, 2013
Trust no one: Japan's magazines offer a bleak message
What a bleak picture emerges from the nation's weekly and monthly periodicals: Trust is simple-minded, mistrust paranoid.
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Oct 26, 2013
Oh, to be blissfully unfree in Nippon's isles . . .
"Freedom." "Liberty." Ringing words. Better than any other, they define modern times. They sparked three early-modern revolutions — England's "Glorious Revolution" (1688), the American Revolution of 1776-83, and the French Revolution beginning around 1789.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Oct 19, 2013
Enough already: Can Japan settle for less?
The pua-ju016b philosophy in short: Poverty as Japan understands it is not real poverty and does not rule out happiness. In fact, it may even be conducive to it.
Japan Times
LIFE
Oct 12, 2013
Kanpai! Sake through the ages
'A civilization stands or falls by the degree to which drink has entered the lives of its people, and from that point of view Japan must rank very high among the civilizations of the world.'
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Oct 5, 2013
Is the honeymoon over for young, wedded bliss?
A visitor from another planet (a unisexual planet, let's say) would speedily infer that men and women are mutually hostile creatures. Marriage would puzzle her (the feminine pronoun is purely arbitrary) — all the more so if she stayed long enough to learn the language and hear how ancient and universal...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Sep 28, 2013
Nothing is clear about court ruling on illegitimate kids
Evidently I was wrong.
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Sep 21, 2013
Ancient tales by the 'savages' of Hokkaido have lessons for today
Imagine living in a culture with none or very little of the following: politics, economics, property, history, time, agriculture, money, war ambition, heaven, hell, progress, writing ...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Sep 14, 2013
Japanese media declare 'dark times' are on us
Being good has never been easy. And it's not getting easier — unlike many things in this age of mass technological empowerment. If it were, presumably, there would be more good and less evil — unless evil is more attractive?
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 31, 2013
Married or single, Japan is a desolate country
"The past century is a history of sexual distortion," social psychologist Hiroyoshi Ishikawa told Time Magazine in 1983.
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Aug 24, 2013
Only in Japan could a sword be 'life-giving'
Few countries have broken with their past as sharply as Japan did. That was the price it paid for modernity.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 17, 2013
Cyber-kids get a break during Bon holidays
You didn't need prophetic powers, back in the 1980s when the personal computer was starting to show its potential, to foresee something like Internet addiction. It should have been obvious. It was, to science-fiction writer William Gibson. Reminiscing to Time magazine in 1995, he recalled his shock,...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 3, 2013
Closet traditionalists still populate a supposedly single moms' world
Every day some 370,000 babies are born worldwide. Of those born on July 22, 2013, 369,999 went unnoticed outside their immediate circles. The exception was a royal prince, third in line to the British throne. His first photos show him blissfully unaware of the vast excitement he was causing. He'll come...
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Jul 27, 2013
What if Columbus had reached his goal, Japan?
Every school child knows that in 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered America. Every school child knows wrongly. When the Genovese explorer's three ships sailed westward from Palo de la Frontera, Spain, on Aug. 2, 1492, he was bound, he thought, for "the noble island of Cipangu" — Japan.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 20, 2013
Japan's weeklies debate modern man's burden
Pity the declining male in an age of expanding female empowerment!
Two of America’s biggest debt holders are dumping Treasurys
The U.S. Treasury building in Washington. Investors in Japan and China sold a pile of U.S. debt in the last quarter, just before the U.S. presidential election.
Tokyo Metro’s overseas efforts begin in earnest with London deal
Tokyo Metro will soon have a role in the running of London's Elizabeth Line, a major train route serving the U.K.’s capital city and environs.
Russia fired experimental ballistic missile at Ukraine, Putin says
Ukrainian firefighters work on a spot following an airstrike in Dnipro on Thursday.
Ex-yokozuna Kitanofuji dies at 82
Yokozuna Kitanofuji enters the ring during the May 1970 grand sumo tournament in Tokyo.
Man charged with murder allegedly made victim date other men for money
A car carrying suspect Ryotaro Masuda, who was indicted for allegedly beating his 25-year-old girlfriend to death, leaves the Shibuya Police Station in Tokyo on Thursday.
The slow-burn success of ‘A Samurai in Time’
A 19th-century warrior gets struck by lightning and wakes to find himself in 21st-century Kyoto in Junichi Yasuda’s surprise hit “A Samurai in Time.”
Around a quarter of Japan married couples in their 20s met through dating apps
A survey released by an organization promoting “Good Couples Day” shows that 24% of couples in their 20s met their marriage partner through a dating app.
'Tokyo Swindlers': Get deep into the minds of real estate con artists
In Ko Shinjo's "Tokyo Swindlers," a group of con artists manipulates real estate giants into falsified deals within the highly competitive, quick market.
Japan, U.K. and Italy discuss inviting more countries to joint fighter project
A new concept model of a next-generation fighter jet to be jointly developed by Japan, Britain and Italy is on display in Farnborough, Hampshire, in July.
Haruki Murakami's 'The City and Its Uncertain Walls' gives deep deja vu
For “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” translated into English by Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami confronts the ghosts who won't leave him alone.

Podcast

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

Longform

Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.
A boom for business tourism in Japan?
By Kathryn Wortley

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