Hiroji Kataoka
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Hiroji Kataoka (片岡弘次; born 1941) is a Japanese professor of Urdu at Daito Bunka University, where he also serves as dean of the Faculty of International Relations and director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies.[1][2]
Kataoka was born in Saitama Prefecture.[3] He entered the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies' Urdu department in 1964.[1] He describes himself as being an initially unmotivated student, even once failing a class in his second semester. However, he was inspired to work harder after his professor, Takeshi Suzuki, assigned Krishan Chander's short story Sufaid Phool as class reading. The story describes a young mute boy who had fallen in love with a girl but had no way to express his feelings to her except through glances and gestures, which echoed a situation Kataoka was facing in his personal life with a girl he liked but to whom he was too afraid to speak. In the early 1970s, he attended a two-year course in Urdu at the University of Karachi. He joined the faculty of Osaka University in 1974, and moved to Daito Bunka University in 1986.[3]
