Ken and Miye Ota
ballroom dancers and martial artists
Ken Ota and Miye Ota were an American married couple known for teaching martial arts, ballroom dancing, and social graces at their "cultural school" located in Goleta, California.
Ken Ota
Kenji Ota (May 14, 1923 – November 10, 2015) was a second-generation Japanese-American, also known as Nisei, raised in Lompoc, California. Following the enforcement of Executive Order 9066, he and his family were placed in the Japanese American internment camps of World War II. There, he met and married his wife, Miye Ota.
In 1948, after his release from the internment camp, Ota settled in Goleta, California, and with his family's help, built a home from bricks on the converted swamplands.
Ken Ota died in Goleta, California on November 10, 2015, at the age of 92.
Miye Ota
Miye Tachihara Ota (August 26, 1918 – September 15, 2024), was raised in Guadalupe, California. Like Ken, she was also Nisei and she and her family were placed in the Japanese internment camps of World War II, where she met her future husband at the Gila River Relocation Center.
Following her release from internment camp and a brief stay in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Miye leveraged her pre-war beauty school training to open her own salon, which the Otas built themselves from bricks attached to their home in Goleta. Miye would go on to be one of the founding members of the Goleta Chamber of Commerce and was recognized decades later as "Goleta's Finest Woman of the Year" during the Chamber's 69th year.
Miye Ota died on September 15, 2024, at the age of 106.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ken and Miye Ota” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.