Ma (間) is a Japanese concept that roughly translates to “the space between things”, but specifically intentional negative space.
Way back in the day, when I was doing A-Level Film Studies was the first time I’d heard it, and that original memory was re-sparked for me recently watching this YouTube short of Brennan Lee Mulligan and Matt Mercer (of Critical Role fame for ya’ll non-nerds out there) talking about Ma in the context of Seven Samurai and Kurosawa:
Now I wish I could be cool enough to say my first experience with Ma was with a Kurosawa picture, but it was actually with Miyazaki of Ghibli fame. I think Spirited Away (2003 western release)? Because that lines up with his interview with Roger Ebert when he talked about Ma in 2002 so I imagine that might have been one of the sources we’d referenced in class:
“The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have nonstop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time, you just get numb.”
Hayao Miyazaki, Source: Drawing on ‘Spirited’ world, September 19, 2002, BY ROGER EBERT
Now, once you know about Ma, you see it everywhere, even outside of Japanese media and culture. Miles Davis said he built his trumpet style on the notes he didn’t play:
In music, silence is more important than sound
Miles Davis… (Or is it?)
Very Ma, but honestly that’s a pretty apocryphal quote, also attributed to Debussy and Mozart.
It’s one of those concepts that, once you’ve got the word for it, you start spotting it constantly, and it applies in a lot of areas.
Design, music, writing, storytelling and conversation. As someone who’s always thinking about conciseness, it’s another idea I try to be mindful of.
So… Why this is a garden post and not a blog post?
This is something I’ve been itching to turn into a blog post but I can’t think of a way of doing this…
Tastefully?
Or even more bluntly… done well?
I actually had a rough go at a full blog post about this called “Ma: What Kurosawa Can Teach Us About Not Shipping AI Slop” - connecting Ma to generative AI, agentic workflows, the whole thing. But reading it back, it felt too LinkedIn-bait and a bit pretentious.
Plus, to put it bluntly, a western white guy invoking Eastern philosophy to make a point about technology, especially when Miyazaki himself had very strong feelings about GenAI content:
I am utterly disgusted… I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
Miyazaki
But I liked the writing I’d done about Ma itself and didn’t want to waste it, so into the garden it went.
It lives here both as storage for that work and as something that might eventually grow into a proper post with a direction I’m happier with.
But in the mean-time it’s a little reminder of a great core philosophy
As well as an opportunity to have a little Ma moment…
See? You feel better already now you’ve had that little break!