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:
What’s happening in Japan is written all over our faces — our blank, expressionless, masked faces. Never before, it seems safe to say, have so many people gone about masked. Thus we confront the microbes that assault us. Are the microbes disconcerted? It seems not. “As self-protection, ...
The Edo Period (1603-1868) was a bizarre time that visitors to Japan could not help but comment on — the countless laws, the brutal punishments ... and the dogs.
The Japanese weren't always workaholics. Once upon a time, work had its place and knew its place. It didn't swallow life whole. Other pursuits were given their due. People worked without being consumed by work. Author Jiro Asada, writing in PHP magazine (April), refers us ...
Fake news times fake news is fake news squared — which is to say, it goes viral. It multiplies like a virus, which multiplies like fake news. Then the equation gets complicated. What's fake news times a viral epidemic? "Unfortunately," says Weekly Playboy magazine this month, ...
Everybody's hooked on something. What's life without its little pleasures? Mere struggle for survival. Smokers crave nicotine, coffee-drinkers caffeine, gamers games. The pursuit of happiness takes many forms. Society approves of most, frowns on others. Some it bans outright. One Golden Week morning in 2016, ...
"Japanese travel more often than other people," wrote Engelbert Kaempfer, the 17th-century physician, scholar, naturalist and explorer whose "History of Japan" (1712) was the first full-length foreign-language portrait of the nation.
Japan's three leading newspapers, disagreeing on much, agree on this: Japan's democracy is in crisis. "Democratic politics in Japan has become frayed," the Mainichi Shimbun said in an editorial on Jan. 1. "The recent deterioration of Diet deliberations is intolerable," the Yomiuri Shimbun said on Jan. ...
"Some say that though Kobo Daishi (Kukai) left this life he did not die, that he lies uncorrupted in (his tomb on Mount Koya) under these ancient trees, awaiting the coming of the future Buddha who will signal the salvation of the world" — ...
Sleep. Those to whom it comes effortlessly can't imagine the yearning it inspires. The more you yearn for it, the further it recedes. The further it recedes, the more you yearn for it. It becomes everything in life. All other goals pale beside it. Oh, ...
The girl was 15, the teacher in his early 30s. He recognized her ability, encouraged her, befriended her, seduced her. He took her to a love hotel and said, "This is what grown-ups do." The story appeared in the Asahi Shimbun last month in a ...
