Hiroaki Sato (佐藤 紘彰, Satō Hiroaki, born 1942) is a Japanese poet and prolific translator who writes frequently for The Japan Times. He has been called (by Gary Snyder) "perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English".[1] Sato received the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 1999 for his translation of Breeze Through Bamboo by Ema Saikō (Columbia University Press, 1997) and in 2017 for The Silver Spoon: Memoir of a Boyhood in Japan by Kansuke Naka (Stone Bridge Press, 2015).[2]