What does 間 Ma mean?

Ma is the interval. The space between two objects, the silence between two sounds, the beat between a question and its answer. English has words for all of those and treats them as absences; this treats the interval as a thing that is present.

How ordinary the character is

間 is everywhere. It sits inside the word for time, the word for space, and the word for a human being, which is composed of person and interval: a person is something that exists between others.

That frequency matters, because it means the concept is not exotic or specialised. A Japanese speaker complaining that someone's timing was off is using the same character a critic uses about a Noh performance.

Present rather than absent

The distinction is the whole entry. English empty space is defined by what is not in it, and a pause is defined as the interruption of something else. Both are parasitic on the surrounding material.

Here the interval is a component. A composition contains objects and intervals; a performance contains sounds and intervals; a page contains panels and intervals. Removing one degrades the work in the same way removing the other would, which is not how English arranges the idea.

Where it shows in the work

In comics, the gutter between panels and the wordless panel that does nothing but let a moment sit. In animation, the held shot: a character looks at a landscape, nothing occurs, the shot continues past where a Western edit would cut. In theatre, a delay before a line that carries more than the line.

Audiences trained on faster editing frequently read these as slack, and reviewers describe them as padding. Sometimes they are. The distinction between an interval that is doing work and one that is filling time is a craft judgement, and the vocabulary at least makes the question askable.

Why English keeps borrowing it

Architecture and design writing in English have been importing this word for decades, which is unusual: most Japanese aesthetic vocabulary stays in writing about Japan. It travels because practitioners keep needing to say that a void is a designed element and finding that English fights them.

Negative space is the nearest English term and is the closest English gets. Negative is still doing the damage: it defines the interval by subtraction, and the Japanese word does not.