Motohiko Hino — known throughout his career by the nickname "Toko" — was born in Tokyo on January 3, 1946, the younger brother of trumpeter Terumasa Hino. Their father was a dancer and musician who taught both sons tap dancing as small children, so rhythm arrived as a physical discipline before it arrived as an instrument. He took up drums at ten and was working professionally by seventeen.

He became the house drummer of the Tokyo modern-jazz scene almost immediately. By 1967 he was recording with his brother's quartet; by 1969 he was on Hi-Nology, the Terumasa Hino Quintet album that remains the standard entry point to Japanese jazz of the period. Through the 1970s he appeared on a remarkable share of the records that the reissue market later canonised: Masabumi Kikuchi's Poo-Sun (1970) and All About Dancing Mist (1971), Kohsuke Mine's Out of Chaos (1974), Sadao Watanabe's Mbali Africa (1974), Hiromasa Suzuki's Colgen World (1976), and Kazumi Watanabe's Infinite (1971) among them. Readers of Swing Journal voted him Japan's best jazz drummer fifteen years running.

His own leader dates run in parallel from the start. First Album appeared on Columbia's Tact Jazz Series in 1971, the same year he cut two volumes of Beat Drums as Motohiko Hino & His Friends. The 1975 live album Toko — Motohiko Hino Quartet at Nemu Jazz Inn and 1976's "Ryūhyō" 〜Sailing Ice〜 on Three Blind Mice are the two most sought after by collectors. Also in 1976 he recorded a released drum battle opposite the older George Kawaguchi, a format that Japanese labels used to stage generational hand-offs in public.

In 1978 he relocated to New York. He worked in JoAnne Brackeen's trio and recorded or performed with Joe Henderson, Sonny Rollins, Jean-Luc Ponty, Hugh Masekela and John Scofield, appearing on Scofield's 1978 self-titled album. He never fully left the Japanese scene, remaining a first-call presence on Isao Suzuki, Masahiko Satoh and Fumio Karashima dates through the 1980s.

The last decade of his life produced his most personal records. Sailing Stone (Gramavision, recorded 1991) and It's There (1993, with John Scofield and Mike Stern) set his own compositions against reworked Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin material, approached as rhythmic problems rather than as crossover bait. Hip Bone followed in 1994. In 1998 he was part of pianist Junko Onishi's group on Fragile and Self Portrait, and in 1999 he released two further albums of his own, Double Chant and Tac Tic, on EWE Records. He died of cancer on May 13, 1999, aged fifty-three.

Recordings have continued to surface. A previously unreleased 1976 concert from Yamaha Hall was issued as Flying Clouds in 2022, and live trio dates with Masahiko Satoh from 1996 and 1997 appeared in 2015 and 2021.

Hino's playing sits at the junction of American post-bop technique and the harder, more elastic pulse Japanese groups were developing in the late 1960s. He was equally credible driving a modal quintet, sitting inside Masayuki Takayanagi's more abrasive settings, or holding a jazz-funk groove — the reason he turns up across such stylistically scattered sessions.

The tap-dance background is audible in his phrasing: a preoccupation with footwork and with placing accents against the beat rather than on it. His late rock-repertoire albums make the same instinct explicit, treating Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones tunes as rhythmic structures to be dismantled rather than as melodies to be swung.