Masamichi Ogawara was born in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, in 1976. He graduated from the Faculty of Law (Department of Political Science) of Keio University in 1999, completed the Master's program in Political Science at the Graduate School of Law of Keio University in 2001, and completed the doctoral program at the same university in 2003. He holds his Bachelor's, Master's, and doctoral degrees all from Keio University. He was appointed Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of Keio University in 2008 and promoted to Professor in 2013, a position he holds to the present day. During this time, he has held a number of visiting research appointments: Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law (2005); Visiting Scholar at Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University (2013–2014); Visiting International Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (2014); and Visiting Research Scholar at the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, the University of Tokyo (2023–2024).

His field of specialization is the history of Japanese political thought. His research encompasses Yukichi Fukuzawa and his disciples, the Freedom and People's Rights Movement and the samurai rebellions, religion and politics in modern and contemporary Japan, the political and social role of the kazoku (Japanese peerage), and Japanese students who studied in the United States. He is the author of fourteen monographs in Japanese. He has also delivered lectures in the United States at Harvard University, Yale University, MIT, and other institutions. At Keio University, he teaches the history of Japanese political thought and serves as a Member of the Fukuzawa Memorial Center for Modern Japanese Studies. He is a member of the following academic societies: Japanese Conference for the Study of Political Thought, Association for Japanese Intellectual History and Japanese Political Science Association.