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).
For Michael Hoffman's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
An 8-year-old schoolgirl having trouble making friends thought it might be because she smelled bad. She sweated heavily. There's not much you can do about it, except wash, and wash, and wash, but the smell remains — in your own mind if not in ...
Progress: good, or bad? Bad, thought Confucius, who for hundreds of years taught Japan to seek its ideals in the ancient past. Good, thought 19th-century modernizers, who redirected the nation's gaze to the future. Prominent among modernizers was Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901), for whom civilization and ...
"Why don't they get married?" anguished parents wonder of their aging unmarried children. The various explanations boil down to two: "I don't want to" and "I can't" — can't for economic, social or psychological reasons; don't want to because, for example: "For meals there's the ...
Sakae Osugi — born 1885, murdered 1923 — fanned the flames of the peasant Rice Riots in Japan's short-lived age of anarchy.
"To be wronged is nothing," said Confucius — "unless you continue to remember it." Forgetting is not forgiving. Forgiveness is Christianity's noblest quality. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." Not everyone is Christian. Revenge, too, has ...
"Lies!" "Nonsense!" What's true? What's not true? What's fake news? What's real? It's not just politics. Politics is at least comprehensible. We may err, misunderstand and misjudge, but politics speaks our language and invites our participation. Not so medicine. Healthy, we want nothing to do with ...
Japan's Meiji Era (1868-1921) industrial revolution set a scene of chaos for the nation's advocates of political and social change.
In May 1993, general elections were held in Cambodia. Voter turnout was 89.56 percent. People who don't have democracy want it — very badly. Traumatized by 30 years of war, genocide, dictatorship, hunger — just about every evil into which a state can sink — ...
"More than 16,500 women and men were sterilized against their will," reads a newsletter published in 1997 by the Network on Ethics and Intellectual Disability. Shocking. Less so now, as recent developments having made the fact familiar. Shocking all the same. How can civilization have ...
Hideyo Noguchi (1876-1928) may be Japan's most famous scientist. His face adorns the ¥1,000 bill. His life story is legendary, folkloric.
