Pearl Harbor Aftermath: A Memoir by Miye Ota

The last time I met with Miye Ota, she interrupted our interview to get up and dance. I think it was the cha-cha. At the time, her back was not treating her kindly. You would never know. She even flirted with me. “Hey, you’ve got blue eyes,” she exclaimed, in mid-sentence. Ota had just turned 100, and she was in the midst of a community celebration held at the Ota family’s dojo/dance studio in Old Towne Goleta.

To say Miye Ota is a force of nature is to miss the point. It might be more accurate to say nature is a force of Miye. Born in Guadalupe, she would move to Goleta in 1948 and become a founding member of the Goleta Chamber of Commerce. Naturally, she was the only woman on its board. She ran a beauty salon at the time.

In 1964, she and her husband — the acclaimed aikido master Ken Ota — built a martial arts dojo next door out of cinder blocks. There they instilled their students with discipline and respect, as well as teaching martial arts and ballroom dancing skills to generations of children and adults. Theirs may have been the only martial arts studio in the country with two chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.