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:
The world is furious. From Hong Kong to Chile, Indonesia to Bolivia, France to Iraq, Haiti to Iran, Egypt to Peru, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, have declared war on their governments and social systems, decrying dictatorship, corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, inequality, numbness to ...
The BBC in October published a glowing encomium to Japanese cleanliness. "How," it asks, "does Japan stay so clean?" It's deeply ingrained, the report explains. Shinto purifies the body, Buddhism cleanses the mind, the tea ceremony sweeps the last speck of dust from the rustic ...
Why do the sun and the moon see so little of each other? Their quarrel, explains the eighth-century chronicle "Nihon Shoki," was one between siblings. Amaterasu, the sun goddess, was born of their father's left eye; Tsukiyomi, the moon god, of his right eye. ...
'Comparison is a very foolish attitude," said Indian mystic Chandra Mohan Jain, popularly known as Osho (1931-90), "because each person is unique and incomparable. Once this understanding settles in you, jealousy disappears." It may be true, but the fact seems to be that "this understanding ...
How we hate each other. The pertinent Japanese word is kireru, suggestive of a sudden outburst of uncontrollable rage. The Asahi Shimbun last month described a kireyasui shakai (a society in which it's easy to lose your temper). Surveying 1,586 individuals at random, it found ...
We must know, "that a haiku does not express ideas but that it puts forward images reflecting intuitions." — Daisetsu T. Suzuki
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.
