Kazuma Oda was a premier lithographer, etcher, Western-style painter, and print artist born in Tokyo in 1881. After his family relocated to Osaka in 1894, Oda began learning lithographic techniques from his brother at age seventeen. 

In 1900, he entered the private atelier of lithographer Masajiro Kaneko before returning to Tokyo three years later to study yōga-style painting with the artist Kawamura Kiyoo. During his tenure as a newspaper illustrator and commercial lithographer, Oda submitted watercolors to various exhibitions, including Bunten in 1907. The following year, he began contributing to the literary magazine Hosun and became an active member from 1909 to 1911. In 1918, Oda exhibited two sets of color lithographs, each consisting of twenty prints: Collections of Tokyo Landscapes (1915) and Collections of Osaka Landscapes (1916), which quickly established him as the foremost lithographer in Japan. 

Flush with success, he was subsequently invited by sosaku hanga artist Yamamoto Kanae to become a founding member of Nihon Sosaku Hanga Kyokai in 1918 as a representative of the lithographic medium. Although his reputation was founded on lithography, Oda also produced self-carved, self-printed mokuhanga and, throughout the 1920s, designed woodblock prints for Watanabe Shozaburo. Catching Whitebait at Nakaumi, Izumo adapted from van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888), was one of his most successful collaborations with Watanabe. Oda later went on to co-found the Yofu Hangakai in 1930, and Nihon Hanga Kyokai in 1931. In addition to lithography and printmaking, Oda was also keenly interested in the ukiyo-e genre and published several academic works that same year, including Eighteen Studies of Ukiyo-e and Ukiyo-e and the Art of Illustration. 

Furthermore, he gained international recognition after being featured at the 1930 Toledo Exhibition and the follow-up exhibition in 1936. After the onset of the Pacific War, he evacuated to Toyama Prefecture in 1945 and returned to Tokyo four years later, where he established the Oda Lithography Institute in 1953. He passed away three years later at the age of sixty-eight. A highly prolific, multifaceted, and talented individual, Oda Kazuma solidified his reputation amongst some of the greatest print artists of the early modern period.