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April 17, 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
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 / 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 / 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 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 / 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 / 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.
In a first, Japan issues cease-and-desist order against Google
The Google logo is seen at the company's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California. Japanese authorities on Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order to Google over an alleged violation of the country's anti-monopoly law.
Japan to give India E5 and E3 shinkansen for free
A rendering of East Japan Railway's E10 series of bullet trains
China’s new bridge-forming barges offer new options for Taiwan invasion
This satellite image taken on March 25 shows three Chinese barges connected via extendable bridges in waters off Zhanjiang, in southern China's Guangdong province. Experts say the new barges could be used to land heavy equipment and thousands of personnel in a possible invasion of Taiwan.
Four arrested over obscene AI images in Japan first
The suspects used free AI software to create images of naked adult women, who do not exist in the real world, using prompts that included terms such as "legs open," according to NHK.
'Chikan' incidents rise as Japan grapples with mental health and cultural challenges
Overcrowded trains and a lack of legal consequences for groping in Japan have led to a rise in "chikan," or groping, which has been linked to a mental condition and compounded by cultural stigmas.
Privacy and transparency clash in debate over bill on artificial insemination
Sachiko Ishizuka, who was born via artificial insemination by donor (AID), tells her story to lawmakers from the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan on April 9.
Why Ishiba became the first prime minister to hold talks with Rengo in 16 years
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Japanese Trade Union Confederation chief Tomoko Yoshino in a meeting Tuesday at the Prime Minister's Office
In a first, Japan issues cease-and-desist order against Google
The Google logo is seen at the company's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California. Japanese authorities on Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order to Google over an alleged violation of the country's anti-monopoly law.
Sumo's throwback regional tours offer glimpse into sport's heart and history
Kirishima (behind) battles Atamifuji during a regional tour event in Hyogo Prefecture in 2023.
China’s new bridge-forming barges offer new options for Taiwan invasion
This satellite image taken on March 25 shows three Chinese barges connected via extendable bridges in waters off Zhanjiang, in southern China's Guangdong province. Experts say the new barges could be used to land heavy equipment and thousands of personnel in a possible invasion of Taiwan.

Podcast

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

Longform

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.
Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.
By Tomoko Otake

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