Kataoka was born in
Saitama Prefecture. He entered the
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies' Urdu department in 1964. 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. ==Awards and honours==