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April 04, 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).
LIFE / Language
Nov 27, 2007
New translation vividly depicts postwar Tokyo
Shishi Bunroku (the pen name of Iwata Toyoo) is a writer who deserves to be better known. His novel "Jiyu Gakko (School of Freedom)" was a best seller when it first appeared in 1951, and gives as vivid a picture as we're likely to get today of what daily life was like in postwar Tokyo.
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 12, 2007
Japan's Paradise Lived
It's a strange world we're about to enter.
LIFE
Aug 12, 2007
Has another society of such superlatives ever existed at all?
The fascination of the Heian Period (794-1185) lies in the fact that in all world history there is nothing quite like it. It would be hard to imagine a culture more exclusive, more fastidiously refined, more smugly incurious about the unknown, more unwarlike, more tearfully melancholic, more sensitive...
Japan Times
LIFE
Apr 29, 2007
Japan's love affairs with sex
Michael Hoffman delves deep into the carnal history of these islands from the Age of the Gods to the lovelands and soaplands of today
Japan Times
LIFE
Jan 28, 2007
The Courtship
Insight, fate and human frailties intermingle in this love story for winter from the pen of MICHAEL HOFFMAN
LIFE / Language
Jan 23, 2007
Translations blunted by discarded 'somethings'
One of the great pleasures of life in a country not your own is savoring its literature in the original language.
Japan Times
LIFE / CONFUCIUS
Sep 10, 2006
A man in the soul of Japan
This story is part of a package on Confucius. The introduction is here.
Japan Times
LIFE / CONFUCIUS
Sep 10, 2006
Confucius and his 'golden age'
Is what Confucius said true? Can music, poetry and decorum govern the world? Do rulers, by cultivating benevolence in themselves, plant benevolence in their subjects, and harmony in the polity?
LIFE / CONFUCIUS
Sep 10, 2006
East and West echo the sage: 'The ideal society is like a family'
This story is part of a package on Confucius. The introduction is here.
Japan Times
LIFE
Apr 30, 2006
On the road to . . .
"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, . . . Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . . ''
Japan Times
Features
Jan 29, 2006
Cultures combined in the mists of time
Adopt "a correct view of history," China and South Korea demand of Japan. Fair enough. We can all agree on the merits of a "correct view" of anything. The difficulty is to define "correct.''
Features
Sep 25, 2005
Shinobazu Pond
"Listen," said Nishizawa-san.
Japan Times
Features
Dec 26, 2004
Men or monkeys in 2004?
A year is a novel that writes itself. The plot may be incoherent and the main characters disappointing, but the overall effect never fails to be riveting.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 1, 2003
Face to face from worlds far apart
The miracle is no blood was shed. On the contrary, the Americans and the Japanese rather liked each other. That too is something of a miracle.
COMMUNITY
May 11, 2003
Shaking off the shogun's shackles
"The world is wider than we can imagine," said the novelist Iharu Saikaku (1642-93). It's a pregnant thought under a regime doing its utmost to narrow the world. A contemporary of Basho's, Saikaku shows us a restlessness of spirit quite different from the monkish poet's. "There's nothing," declared Saikaku,...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
May 11, 2003
Moon over Matsushima
"God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse . . ."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 30, 2003
Lock & key
KAZUYOSHI UEHARA -- not the Kazuyoshi Uehara -- rang the doorbell. He sensed a pause, a hesitation, an interrupted action -- his imagination no doubt -- and tensed slightly as approaching footsteps grew audible.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 2, 2003
The lady explorer who took a native interest in Hokkaido
"Mori is a large, ramshackle village . . . a wild, dreary-looking place with a number of . . . disreputable characters . . . a forlorn, decayed place." Yubetsu "looks like the end of all things, as if loneliness and desolation could go no farther."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 2, 2003
The Great North
"It is Japan, but yet there is a difference somehow.'' -- Isabella Bird, 1878
COMMUNITY
Sep 15, 2002
Love in a lovelorn land
Once upon a time, at a temple where homeless families were sheltering after a fire, a girl and a boy fell in love. Months passed. The burned-out neighborhood was rebuilt. The lovers were separated. Oh, misery! Oh, fleeting, unreal world!
As ‘Buy Canadian’ grows, more U.S. firms say retailers turning away products
Empty shelves with "Buy Canadian Instead" signs are seen in the American Whiskey section of the BC Liquor in Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 10.
U.S. tourist arrested after bringing a handgun into Japan
Hyogo police believe the handgun a U.S. tourist inadvertently brought into Japan slipped through security procedures at Kansai International Airport in Osaka Prefecture.
Trump unveils 10% global tariff, with Japan levy set at 24%
Trump tosses a MAGA hat to the crowd during an event in which he unveiled new tariffs in the White House on Wednesday.
Meiji says sayonara to bottled milk, a staple of Japan's bathhouses
Meiji bottled milk lined up in a fridge at Kosugiyu, a bathhouse in Tokyo. The sticker urges patrons to enjoy the milk one last time before it’s gone.
Japan’s leader didn’t read the job description
Prime Minister and ruling Liberal Democratic Party leader Shigeru Ishiba is facing a political funding scandal that has damaged his reputation and sparked speculation that internal efforts to remove him are underway.
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.
Meiji says sayonara to bottled milk, a staple of Japan's bathhouses
Meiji bottled milk lined up in a fridge at Kosugiyu, a bathhouse in Tokyo. The sticker urges patrons to enjoy the milk one last time before it’s gone.
A Canadian made a weekend trip to Costco a Japanese pastime
Under the watchful eye of Ken Theriault, Costco representative director and Japan country manager, the American membership-model wholesaler has flourished in Japan.

Podcast

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

Longform

Professional cleaner Hirofumi Sakurai takes a moment to appreciate some photographs in a Gotanda apartment whose occupant died alone.
The last cleanup: Life and death in a lonely Japan
By Johan Brooks

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