Professor Emeritus Hiroshi Machida (Hiroshi hereafter) is the leading tephrochronologist of his generation in Japan. Perhaps more than any other geoscientist from Japan, Hiroshi carried the insights and advances of tephra studies and their application in palaeoenvironmental and archaeological applications, landscape processes, and volcanology and hazard analysis, to the outside world through a succession of papers and books written in English and through conference presentations. He has been the ‘international face’ of tephra studies in Japan