Mineo OTA was born in Tokyo. In 1996, after taking his degree of MA at the University of Tokyo with the dissertation on Bartók, he moved to Budapest and continued his research at the Budapest Bartók Archives. In 2000 he moved back to Tokyo and enrolled for PhD program at the University of Tokyo. Since then he published several papers in Japanese and in English. In 2009 he took his doctorate at the University of Tokyo with the dissertation entitled “Cultural Nationalism and Modernism in Béla Bartók’s activities–On the Role of ‘Peasant Music'” (written in Japanese). His current research interests include Bartók, history of comparative musicology, reception history of the cimbalom in the 19^th-century Hungarian bourgeois society, and Joseph Joachim. Since April 2013 he works at Department of Music of Miyagigakuin Women’s University as associate professor.