Ota Koshi

Born 1909 in Ako, Hyogo, Ota earned his teaching credentials in 1927. Championing the Proletarian Education Movement (also known as the New Education Movement), he integrated printmaking into his elementary school classroom curriculum, inspired by the dynamic self-expression it sparked in his young students. In 1937 he resigned from teaching and moved to Tokyo, where he studied under Okada Saburosuke at the Hongo Western Painting Institute. While working as an editor for the magazine Gakko Bijutsu (School Art), he learned woodblock printing from Onchi Koshiro, and studied alongside artists such as Ima Junzo and Sekino Junichiro at Nishida Takeo’s Japan Etching Institute. In 1938 Ota co-founded the satirical cartoon magazine Karikare, which was shut down in 1941 due to wartime censorship. Drafted into military service in China in 1944, he was held as a prisoner of war following the end of World War II until his repatriation in 1946. In 1949 he helped found the Japan Print Movement Association, and in 1951 established the Association of Art Education in Creative Print, successfully popularizing educational printmaking throughout Japan through correspondence courses and the association’s official journal, Hanga. He passed away in 1998.