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:
"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.
The utopia of utopias is "Utopia" by Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). Its best feature is leisure. There are no idle nobles; everyone works. A burden shared is a burden lightened. Utopians "do not wear themselves out with perpetual toil from morning to night, as ...
"Your mother is senile, senile, senile!" The family was dining at a restaurant. Mom had gone to the rest room and Dad, in anguish, faced his two grown children. Sawako Agawa — TV personality, journalist and author — recalls the scene for Bungei Shunju magazine ...
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 ...
