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April 26, 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 / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 7, 2013
Men cry discrimination as women's status rises
Japan, it seems, is forever discriminating against someone. Women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, lifestyle minorities, the disabled, part-time workers — all have made claims against a state and a national psychology that define acceptability very narrowly relative to most other developed societies....
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 31, 2013
Life is too short for an undesirable satori
The wise have always inveighed against materialism. But most people are not wise, and it remains a material world. The economy dominates the news, an indication of where our strongest interest lies. Our spirits rise or fall with the stock market, the unemployment rate, the value of the yen, the consumer...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 17, 2013
Japan needs to humor its old teacher: China
Is it true, as the American philosopher George Santayana famously remarked just over a century ago, that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"? If it is, is the reverse necessarily false? Imagine he had said — his eye, for example, on the current discord between Japan and...
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Mar 4, 2013
Tense times in Japan's relationships with its neighbors
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 3, 2013
Solution to bullying lies in 'resetting' culprits
"The biggest problem in Japanese education is the idea that you can eliminate bullying by reforming the system."
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Feb 17, 2013
Hiding from strangers in the global village
In his 1993 novel "Hanauzumi," Junichi Watanabe pictures a prosperous farming village in Saitama. The year is 1868. The Meiji Restoration has just occurred. The shogun has been overthrown. The teenage Emperor Meiji has been conveyed from the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto and installed in Tokyo. Great...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Feb 10, 2013
The evolution of Japan's turn away from Confucian ideas
'The evolution of political thought in this relatively isolated island nation during the period in question is unique to the point of being somewhat freakish,” writes political thought scholar Hiroshi Watanabe of the University of Tokyo.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Feb 4, 2013
'Abenomics' will either make or break Japan's economy
This story is concerned with money, vast sums of it, amounts quite beyond most people's imagination. The operative word is chu014d (u5146, trillion).
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Feb 3, 2013
Constitutional revision may bring less freedom
Article 18 of Japan's Constitution states, "No person shall be held in bondage of any kind. Involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime, is prohibited."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jan 26, 2013
Nothing much compels reader to sympathize with characters
RIVER OF FIRE and Other Stories, by O Chonghui. Translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton. Columbia University Press, 2012, 224 pp., $27.50 (hardcover)
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jan 19, 2013
Japan's growing diaspora reflects concern for the country's future
Here's a surprising fact: One Japanese in a hundred lives abroad. It's surprising because so much is made lately of Japan's growing insularity. Young people seem less interested than ever in studying overseas, and voters last month elected a new government whose platform includes strong doses of patriotism...
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jan 7, 2013
No loss for words when expressing scale of DPJ's defeat
December's election aftermath offered a good chance to learn synonyms for "crushing defeat" and "overwhelming victory." Taihai (大敗, great defeat), kanpai (完敗, total defeat) — not to be confused with kanpai! (乾杯, cheers!) — kaimetsutekina haiboku (壊滅的な敗北, annihilating defeat),...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jan 6, 2013
Additives: Let's hope we are not what we eat
Four-legged chickens
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Dec 30, 2012
As the new year approaches, Japan still reels from 2011
What a sad, sad country this is. What sad shape it's in, as this Year of the Dragon draws to a close. Economically, politically socially, individually, it is merely scraping by, surviving rather than living.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Dec 23, 2012
Abe is a hawk, the public merely conservative
Commenting acidly on November's U.S. presidential election, American columnist George Will said all it showed was "whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney has the smaller gigantic number of Americans not wanting him to be president." Substitute the names of Prime Minister-elect Shinzo Abe and outgoing Prime...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / THE YEAR IN BOOKS
Dec 23, 2012
Four aspects of Japan's history
"Oh, what happy people they must have been!" Thus Yukie Chiri (1903-22), reflecting on the pristine past of her people, the Ainu of southwestern Hokkaido. "Ainu Spirits Singing" (University of Hawaii Press) by Sarah Strong is an elegy to a lost time and an almost lost culture, seen largely through Chiri's...
Japan Times
WORLD
Dec 9, 2012
The ends of the world
We are doomed. Are we doomed? December 21, 2012 is 12 days away. The world will end on that day, says the ancient Mayan calendar. Or does it say that? Whether it does or not (most experts now agree it does not) other dangers loom — a fatal "galactic alignment," a mysterious wandering planet on a collision...
Japan Times
LIFE
Dec 9, 2012
Our deepest fears fuel the booming business of doomsday scenarios
Apocalypse 2012 was born in 1996.
LIFE
Dec 9, 2012
Apocalypse made in Japan
A world-ending cataclysm is common to many mythologies. The Biblical flood narrative is the best known and follows a fairly typical pattern: wrathful deity, mass destruction, surviving remnant — in this case the righteous man Noah and his family. We gather from these tales that life to early humans...
LIFE / Language
Dec 3, 2012
A third force enters the election race
On Nov. 16 Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda shūin wo kaisan shita (衆院を解散した, dissolved the Diet's Lower House). In August he had promised to do it "chikai uchi ni" (「近いうちに」"soon"). The term is elastic and the governing Minshuto (民主党, Democratic Party of Japan, DPJ) stretched...
Naked man’s rampage in Saitama linked to one fatality and 10 injured
Police believe Daisuke Nishimura may have been involved in roughly 20 incidents in the 90 minutes leading up to his arrest, including a fatal hit-and-run and multiple assaults.
Japan set to fine cyclists on the spot for rule violations from 2026
Under new rules, those who use smartphones while riding a bicycle would be subject to the maximum fine of ¥12,000.
Japan brings forward deadline for electronic travel authorization system
Japan is planning to implement by March 2029 a new online screening system in which foreign visitors who don’t need a visa apply for a certification before entering the country.
Built in a flash, Osaka Expo pavilions wrestle with sustainability
Kengo Kuma & Associates oversaw the construction of the Malaysia pavilion, which is encased in interwoven rows of bamboo that appear to ripple.
Social media helps fuel growing 'sex tourism' in Japan
People walk down a street in the red-light entertainment area of Kabukicho in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo on March 31.
Amid uncertain tariffs, is now the time to buy a new iPhone?
An Apple store in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward in September. Prices for the newest iPhone models start at around ¥100,000 ($700) in Japan.
Built in a flash, Osaka Expo pavilions wrestle with sustainability
Kengo Kuma & Associates oversaw the construction of the Malaysia pavilion, which is encased in interwoven rows of bamboo that appear to ripple.
Japan weighs using U.S. rice imports as tariff negotiation tool with Trump
A restaurant owner pours California-grown Calrose rice into a rice cooker at his restaurant in Tokyo
Is Japan’s parliament ready to welcome more youth to its ranks?
Lower House lawmaker Kai Odake in his Tokyo office on Wednesday
Crow meat, goat tartare: Mauvaise Herbe raises its game
Crow meat, shaped into a ball and attached to a foot of the bird, is one of the peculiar offerings of game at Mauvaise Herbe.

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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