He is an associate professor of cross-field research at the National Museum of Ethnology which is the largest research institute for the humanities in Japan and is one of the six members of the National Institutes for the Humanities, Japan (NIHU).
Ota is also working for the Graduate University for Advanced Studies as an associate professor of museum studies, and is affiliated at the American Museum of Natural History as a research associate of anthropology.
He also completed an additional doctoral program in anthropology at Seoul National University from 2000 to 2003.
More specifically, he tries to explain how people and societies recognize their own cultural "change."
He has pursued this question mainly through case studies of Korean political history and intellectual subculture.