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:
In 1983, Time magazine looked at Japan and saw, to its astonishment, a "land without lawyers." "Most Japanese," said its report, "live — and die — without ever having seen a lawyer." Was this a country, or a mystic brotherhood? In the U.S. there ...
In 1837 famine raged: In Europe, socialist consciousness was dawning, but in Japan, shut tight for two centuries against the outside world, revolt against the established order was Confucian.
Bulgarian scholar Ivan Krastev, in an interview with the Asahi Shimbun published in March, compared the restless discontent of the 1960s with that of today. Fifty years ago, he said, disgust with the status quo fed hope for the future. Today it feeds nostalgia ...
KonMari? Let's, by all means. If that's meaningless to you, you might want to ask yourself this question: Is my life clogged, cluttered? Marie Kondo is one of the world's most influential people. American weekly news magazine Time said so in 2015, conferring a rare distinction ...
"No famous character in all Japanese history is quite as obscure as Kusunoki Masashige," writes historian Ivan Morris on 14th-century Emperor Go-Daigo's most loyal samurai.
Talking to oneself is not respectable. It suggests many things, none of them good: abysmal loneliness, a mental screw loose, a social wire frayed, insanity, dementia. Shukan Post magazine this month cites experts in dementia who see solitary dialogue as a potential premonitory sign ...
There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything — and you're probably doing it wrong. All the activities of life — big and small, monumental and trivial, from waking to sleeping, bathing to eating, dressing to undressing, working to playing — raise ...
The anonymous 14th-century chronicle "Masukagami" ("The Clear Mirror," translated by George Perkins), dramatically details the trials and errors of Emperor Go-Daigo, the 96th emperor of Japan.
What's in a name? What's in an era? What is an "era"? What's a "new era"? Are we entering one? To take the last question first: Not really, said 57 percent of respondents to a survey the Asahi Shimbun conducted in March versus 37 percent ...
Is democracy dying? Certainly authoritarianism is rising. A generation ago, it was the opposite — authoritarianism seemed moribund, democracy on the cusp of new life. Sekai magazine (April) sums up the gloomier mood now gaining ground. "We cannot," it says, "take democracy for granted." This ...
