Hirotada Ototake

Hirotada Ototake is usually introduced through one book, and I suspect that irritates him more than anyone. No One's Perfect genuinely shifted how Japan talked about disability, but treating it as the whole man misses everything since. He came out of Waseda's political science and economics faculty, wrote about sports, taught in an elementary school classroom, kept writing fiction and essays, and ran for public office. That is four or five careers, not a single inspiring anecdote. His public life has also not been smooth; he has taken serious, sustained criticism and kept appearing in public anyway, which is harder than it sounds. The thing I respect most is that he never let himself be turned into other people's feel-good material. He talks about his own life in his own words, on his own terms, and he always has.

Name (English)

Hirotada Ototake

Name (Japanese)

乙武洋匡

Born

April 6, 1976 (age 50)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Aries / Dragon

Origin

Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan

Occupation

teacher / writer / journalist / political candidate / sports journalist

High school

Setagaya Ward Yoga Junior High School

University

School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University

Motto

Private

• Official sitehttps://ototake.com/
• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/ototake_official/
• Xhttps://x.com/h_ototake
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B9%99%E6%AD%A6%E6%B4%8B%E5%8C%A1

Tags

• Tokyo
• teacher
• writer
• journalist

Last updated

2026-07-27

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.