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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 / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Sep 18, 2011
Is permanent connectedness really something we all need?
An Associated Press report of Apple Inc.'s CEO Steve Jobs' resignation last month stated, "Jobs helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist's obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home." This testifies to Jobs' genius but fails to raise what seems an obvious question: Is it a change for...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Sep 5, 2011
National child allowance threatened by rebuilding cost
Kodomo teate (子供手当て, child allowance) is a benign, beneficent social policy rooted in horror, having first seen the light of day in certain European countries that had been dangerously depopulated by World War I.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Sep 4, 2011
These may be interesting times, yet we yearn to return to normality
"May you live in interesting times," goes the familiar curse — or as the Chinese say in a similar vein, "It's better to be a dog in times of peace than a human in times of chaos."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 28, 2011
Forgotten atrocity of the atomic age
Hiroshima was nothing. Nine years later on March 1, 1954, there occurred at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands an atomic blast equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshimas.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 21, 2011
Now it's Japan's turn to shout 'Yes, we can!'
Two thousand eight was a dreadful year. Long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were going badly. The U.S. "subprime crisis" was strangling the global economy. Rising food prices were causing concern at best, riots at worst. The worse things got, the more helpless the world's democratic leaders showed themselves...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 7, 2011
Man convicted of murder may soon be proved innocent
"Can you imagine how it feels for an innocent man to be kept in prison for years?" demanded Govinda Prasad Mainali during a Japan Times interview in November 2003.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Aug 1, 2011
Japan finally seems to be shifting from nuclear power
Post-nuclear Japan?
Japan Times
LIFE
Jul 31, 2011
Most unlikely bedfellows
"How wonderful! How marvelous! From here to the southeast is what the Westerners call the Pacific Ocean and the American states! They must be very close!" — Watanabe Kazan, artist and samurai, in a diary recording a sojourn in Enoshima, an island off Kamakura in present-day Kanagawa Prefecture,...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 17, 2011
It seems Japan has literally gone to the dogs
Japan has found an answer to loneliness, despair, fear, disgust and uncertainty. Hint: It's alive, stands on four legs and barks. Well, so much the better if the gloom weighing us down can be so easily dispelled. Or is it?
CULTURE / Books
Jul 10, 2011
Salvation through baffling wisdom
PURIFYING ZEN: Watsuji Tetsuro's Shamon Dogen. Translated by Steve Bein. University of Hawai'i Press, 2011, 174 pp., $24 (paper) Zen is baffling: You find yourself wrestling with thoughts such as "It is easy to grasp body-mind. The world is like rice or flax or bamboo or bulrushes."
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jul 4, 2011
Today's youth have it hard, but is it worse than before?
Young people the world over are stuck with the world as it is, a world they had no hand in making. From the sidelines they blame their elders for this stupidity and that, and vow to do better when their turn comes, only to find, for the most part, that youthful risōshugi (理想主義, idealism) dies...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 3, 2011
Japan needs to do more than simply 'cope' with stress
What's ailing us? The list is long. In a nutshell: stress. Sixty percent of Japan's work force suffers from it, according to the business magazine Weekly Toyo Keizai.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 19, 2011
Japan's leadership desperately needs some sex appeal
What a pity Aristophanes died c. 388 B.C: That classical Athenian comic playwright knew politics and politicians. They kindled his comic wrath. "O, thou that shavest close thy passionate arse!" he wrote of one politician. Of another: "Noisome was the stench that issued from the brute as it slid forth,...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jun 6, 2011
What will Japan learn from the Fukushima meltdowns?
Can Japan afford nuclear power? Can Japan afford to dispense with nuclear power? If the answer to both questions is no — as, in the wake of the Fukushima reactor meltdowns, it appears it may be — we are at a fukurokōji (袋小路, impasse). What to do?
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 5, 2011
Sadly, the pleasant diversion of literature is losing its appeal
Radiation and rubble — that's Japan's reality now and for the foreseeable future; the only escape is to seize the bull called "relevance" by the horns and fling it to the devil. Gladly I accept the challenge. If I need an excuse, the bimonthly magazine Brutus provides one. Its June 1 edition, 118 pages...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
May 22, 2011
Extreme nationalism may emerge from the rubble of the quake
Destruction, when massive but not total, engenders rebirth, or reinvention, or both. Japan after World War II is a prime example, a model from which Japan in the wake of March's earthquake-tsunami-meltdown is sure to draw inspiration.
CULTURE / Books
May 15, 2011
Natsume Soseki: mining a literary treasure
THEORY OF LITERATURE AND OTHER CRITICAL WRITINGS, by Natsume Soseki. Columbia University Press, 2009, 287 pp., $50 (hardcover) Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) is said to rank among the world's great 20th-century writers. Many consider him Japan's greatest modern novelist. His books, from the comic "I Am a...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
May 8, 2011
Checking the time on the Doomsday Clock
In 1902, an American science writer named Robert Kennedy Duncan wrote a magazine piece titled "Radio-Activity: A New Property of Matter." Its subject is French physicist Henri Becquerel's discovery, in 1896, of the rays that now bear his name. Duncan's tone is so radiant with hope, so luminous with the...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
May 2, 2011
Reading between the lines of disaster vocabulary
If you chanced to visit Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s website in mid-April, you probably saw a note regarding the utility's tsunami e no taisaku (津波への対策, tsunami policy). Clearly it had been written in more innocent times. Relax, it said in effect. The policy was iron-clad. It rested on painstaking...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 24, 2011
Office ladies, our fresh-faced saviors
Slowly the nation wakes from its nightmare. Tokyo Disneyland reopens. A semblance of normality returns, at least to areas outside the stricken zone.
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.
Ishiba aggravates his own political failures with diplomatic faux pas
Prime Minster Shigeru Ishiba is greeted at the APEC summit in Lima by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday. The Japanese leader was criticized for remaining seated while meeting several world leaders at the event.
Japan's 3.31 million visitors in October set monthly record
Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto in December 2023. Famous autumn leaf colors contributed to increased tourism demand last month from many markets across Asia, Europe and North America, the Japan National Tourism Organization has said.
Japan ranks last in romance satisfaction for second straight year
In a survey of 31 countries, Japan ranked last in terms of those who felt loved, with just 51% of respondents saying so.
Ruling coalition and DPP strike last-minute deal over economic policy
DPP policy chief Makoto Mahaguchi speaks at the party's policy gathering in Tokyo on Wednesday.
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.
Japanese expats in Asia find community through rugby
The Taiwan Fivewoods celebrate their victory at the 2023 Asian Japanese Rugby Cup in December of last year.
In Fukushima, a weekend of prose, poetry and translation
Aomori-based writer JJ Carter presented on tabletop gaming as creative inspiration for building characters and narratives.
For Dr. Nakamats, aging is just experience in action
Though he didn't win the recent gubernatorial election in Tokyo, the 96-year-old Dr. Nakamats' run was seen as inspirational in Japan's aging society.

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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