Motoo Ōtaguro

Early life

Ōtaguro was born in Tokyo, on January 11, 1893. He was born into a wealthy family; his father was Jūgoro Ōtaguro, an entrepreneur influential in the adoption of hydroelectricity in Japan. Ōtaguro had private piano lessons with Hanka Petzold. He graduated from Odawara High School.

After graduating from high school, Ōtaguro went abroad to study economics at the London School of Economics from 1913 to 1914. He attended many concerts of contemporary music during his time in London. He became acquainted with works by English contemporaries such as Frederick Delius and Ralph Vaughan Williams as well as other European composers such as Claude Debussy and Alexander Scriabin. He went back to Japan in July 1914 for a summer vacation but was unable to return to London due to the outbreak of World War I. Starting his career as a music writer, he published his first two books in 1915. One of these was From Bach to Schoenberg, which covered sixty European composers and was the first Japanese book to cover modern composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Claude Debussy.

From 1915 to 1917, Ōtaguro held private concerts in his Ōmori-sannō mansion, where he played contemporary pieces on his own piano, despite not being a professional musician. These concerts were held for an audience of about 20 people, including composer Keizō Horiuchi and critic Kōichi Nomura. Despite their small and private audiences, the concerts had programs printed elaborately by Kiyoshi Hasegawa, who lived in Ōmori-sannō at the time. Ōtaguro held a piano concert at the Tokyo YMCA center titled "Scriabin–Debussy Evening" on December 9, 1916. This was the first concert in Japan dedicated to either of the composers' music.

In 1916, Ōtaguro started the publishing company Ongaku to Bungakusha. It published books and a magazine titled Ongaku to Bungaku, which ran until 1919. He revised and compiled essays he wrote for the magazine into multiple books. By 1921, the company ceased its activities. Ōtaguro went on to publish books for Daiichi Shobō in 1925, who also reprinted works published by Ongaku to Bungakusha.

He was a founding member of the photography group Photographic Art Society, which was active from 1921 to 1924. Other members of the group included Shinzō and Rosō Fukuhara. The society was affiliated with a magazine, Shashin geijutsu, published from June 1921 until September 1923; Ōtaguro contributed an article, "Shashin shoron" (写真小論), to its first issue. His photography career was short lived, and he did not get much recognition as a photographer.

After World War II, he made appearances on the NHK radio quiz show Hanashi no Izumi .

Ōtaguro was recognized as a Person of Cultural Merit, one of Japan's highest honors, in 1977.

Ōtaguro married his wife, Chizue Hirota, in 1919.

Ōtaguro's other keen interests included baseball, sumō, detective stories, and poetry.