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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

Nov 5, 2016

The unbearable burden of 24/7 work

There was no nonsense about the 1990s in Japan. The economy had crashed, the bubble had burst. "The age of human relationships is over," declared a corporate executive to Aera magazine in 1996, defending the cost-cutting layoffs then gathering speed. "This is the era of the discount store. The only sales...

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Oct 15, 2016

The audacity of trust: defying the dangers of life in Japan

I am a very trusting fellow. When I cross the street I trust the driver of the approaching vehicle to suppress whatever rage or hatred my appearance may inspire and not mow me down. I walk down the street trusting those within knife-range not to have a knife, or whoever has one not to be in the grip...

Japan Times

JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST

Oct 15, 2016

Fifteenth-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa: Impotent or indifferent?

'The Creation of the Soul of Japan" is how Donald Keene, the eminent Japanologist, subtitled his 2003 biography of 15th-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. What is the soul of Japan? Tea, flowers, noh drama, simplicity, suggestiveness. War too — but Yoshimasa had no taste for war. No taste for power...

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Oct 1, 2016

Who advises Japan's business leaders?

Take a wild guess: Who's the second most influential management guru in Japan, after — it almost goes without saying — Peter Drucker?

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Sep 17, 2016

'Elderly terrorists' and 'hidden poverty' — Japan's new normal?

It's hard to read Spa! magazine without feeling that something is dreadfully wrong with Japan. Week after week, it pursues themes that soon grow familiar: hopeless poverty, pointless toil, unrelieved loneliness. In just one issue this month (Sept. 6) it tackles, in separate articles, "hidden poverty,"...

Japan Times

JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST

Sep 17, 2016

The rise of a toxic machine named fascism

Why not fascism?

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Sep 3, 2016

Building a stairway to the singularity

A computer's victory over a human go master this past March reminds us of the pending "singularity" — the rapidly approaching moment in time when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence. Machines will learn, and we won't be their teachers. Are we prepared for it? Can we prepare for it?...

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Aug 20, 2016

How to teach moral education in a relative age?

The wartime moral ideal was blind obedience and self-sacrificing devotion to the nation. Could the upgrading of moral education be a first step on the road back to that?

Japan Times

JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST

Aug 20, 2016

An awakening gives birth to modern medicine

Illness we share with our ancestors. Diagnosis and remedies set us and them apart.

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Aug 13, 2016

A world gone mad? That's quite absurd!

Real life is getting too absurd for absurd theater — or so reckons one absurdist playwright. Does he have a point?

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Jul 23, 2016

A dark age dawns for politics in Japan

"Historic," that much-overused word, seems almost acceptable as a description of the Upper House elections earlier this month that gave Japan — for the first time in its postwar history — a government strong enough to get serious about rewriting the Constitution.

Japan Times

JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST

Jul 16, 2016

'Zen's sudden awakening to the truth beyond reason, beyond language'

Rabbi Zusia tramped through his native Poland — this admittedly is an odd way of introducing a story about Zen — collecting money to ransom Jews unjustly imprisoned, victims of the rampant anti-Semitism then prevailing. At a wayside inn he saw birds in a cage. Zusia, simple soul that he was, promptly...

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Jul 9, 2016

Cracks are appearing in Japan's 'healthy' image

Few people snack on baby carrots. Most prefer the sweet, fat, high-calorie fare colloquially known as junk food.

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Jun 25, 2016

A confused, senile future awaits Japan

Confucius said: "When your parents are alive, serve them according to ritual. When they die, bury them according to ritual, make sacrifices to them according to ritual."

Japan Times

JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST

Jun 18, 2016

Absolutism: an acceptable price to pay for order

His contemporaries hardly knew what to make of him. Their bewilderment is reflected in the name by which he is best known to us: the "dog shogun."

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Jun 11, 2016

In Japan, all that is true melts into hot air

'Is it because the truth is so boring," asked the 14th-century monk Yoshida no Kenko in a classic collection of musings known as the "The Grasses of Idleness," "that most stories one hears are false?"

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

May 28, 2016

Poverty and boredom gnaw at Japan

Boredom, poverty and war: three themes you’d think (wrongly) would be extinct by now — war because humankind as a whole is more peaceably inclined than ever before, poverty because of an abundance of riches and boredom because ... doesn't it go without saying, given the endless stream, not to say...

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

May 14, 2016

There's no escape from big data's eye

I am being watched. I am under surveillance. So are you. There are eyes on us, or maybe it's just one eye. Singular or plural, it is/they are ubiquitous, all-seeing. It/they never sleep(s). So much the better, for at least two reasons: 1) We are better protected, and 2) we are better informed.

JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST

May 14, 2016

Has pacifism always been doomed to fail in Japan?

Japan had a pacifist "constitution" long before 1947, when the current one went into effect. It was issued in the year 604, its author so esteemed, in his own time and since, as to merit the posthumous name Shotoku Taishi (Crown Prince Sage-Virtue). His lifetime (574-622) spanned an early phase of Japan's...

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN

Apr 30, 2016

Human primacy is go-ing, go-ing, gone

It is said of the ancient Chinese game go that the number of possible positions on its board exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

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

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Smile! It’s ‘Sanrio Time,’ now and ever after

Smile! It’s ‘Sanrio Time,’ now and ever after

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