Otsuka Gen was born in Tokyo, but his father, Masayoshi, was originally from the town of Toyotsu in Fukuoka prefecture.
The family in Toyotsu owned a coal mine, so Masayoshi grew up privileged and entered Ueno Art College in Tokyo to pursue his artistic ambitions.
Still, his father would not allow him to pursue it and forced him to enroll as a photography student at the Tokyo Industrial Art High School in 1929.
Through his father's various connections in the burgeoning photography societies, Gen found employment at the Asahi newspaper when he graduated in 1933.
[2] As a student, he had the opportunity to join meetings held by members who founded the photography magazine, Koga, like Ihee Kimura, Iwata Nakayama, and Yasuzo Nojima.
[3] Other members included Hiromu Hara, Hikaru Yamanouchi, Koji Nishikigori, Tomizo Yoshikawa, and critics such as Takoho Tagaki, Nyozenkan Hasegawa, and Muneyoshi Yanagi.
As the youngest regular member of the group, the lively egalitarian environment of open discussions heavily influenced him.
A photo of a puppet lying on a table that Otsuka took sparked a fierce debate between Kimura Ihee and Nobuo Ina.
It was there that they developed a technique for making life-size prints of human models for department store advertisements, as mannequins were not yet widely used at the time.
Ostuka struck gold as he became flooded with orders from various department stores; he became so busy that he had to hire students from Ueno Art College to help him.
He never used a staff photographer and covered various topics such as police, general interest, army-related, and travel stories.
They questioned him about the content of his reporting and his lack of coverage of the war efforts, although they let him go after he promised to change his ways.
[2] In 1942, Otsuka was transferred to the Asahi Bangkok branch going to Saigon briefly before being sent to Singapore and finally Seoul in 1944, where he taught photographic and darkroom techniques to the staff of Mainichi Shinpo.
He also photographed Emperor Hirohito’s visit to Osaka and other cultural events such as the Koshien high school baseball tournament.
Ihee Kimura was the editorial advisor, and the magazine began to include works by foreign photographers and have columns on the latest global photography trends.
Photographers such as Shoji Otake, Jun Miki, Takamasa Inamura, and Shotaro Akiyama featured prominently.