Osamu Tagaya was born 1950 in Yokosuka, Japan. His father was a technical officer in the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) assigned to the Naval Air Technical Arsenal (Koku Gijutsu Sho) during World War II. He is also the grandson of an Imperial Japanese Navy captain who spent the war years in Europe as naval attaché in Rome and Berlin, and the grand-nephew of an IJN admiral who commanded a land-based naval air flotilla at Rabaul, New Britain during the Guadalcanal campaign.

Since childhood, Osamu has had a deep interest in military aviation history. He learned English in Montreal, Canada when his father’s postwar work took the family there in 1957. As a student, he majored in history as an undergraduate at Tufts University earning a BA in History, before going on to earn a J.D. degree at Cornell University Law School. In his professional career, Osamu worked in the financial field in investment banking and early-stage private investments. Now mostly retired from professional life, he devotes most of his time and energies to his interest in military aviation history.

Starting in the late 1980’s he has contributed Japanese primary source material, translation, and research for each volume of the Eagles Over the Pacific series.