Goleta’s Miye Ota Dies at Age 106

Onetime Internment Camp Internee Ran Dance Instruction Studio and Martial Arts Dojo in Old Town with Husband Ken Ota

Miye Ota | Credit: Paul Wellman file photo

Miye Ota — a beautician, hairdresser, dance instructor, diva, Big Wow spirit, onetime Japanese-American internment camp internee, and the only woman to serve on the founding board of the Goleta Chamber of Commerce — died two weeks ago, a few weeks after celebrating her 106th birthday late this August.

Ota — who, alongside her husband, Ken Ota, ran a much-celebrated dance instruction studio and martial arts dojo in Old Town Goleta since 1964 — spent the last two years of her life under hospice care at Casa Los Padres.

“Casa Los Padres used to be dull until I came and spiced it up,” she said a few years ago with her customary laugh. Animated by a fiercely celebratory spirit, Ota would add, “I didn’t come here to die. I came here to live.”

Ota grew up in northern Santa Barbara County outside of Guadalupe by Oso Flaco Lake, her father a Japanese immigrant and farmer.

“It was a bare nothing,” she said of the place when her parents arrived. In 1923, the family was forced to move because of a law passed that year barring Japanese people from owning land.

In her memoir, Ota credits her father for encouraging her independent spirit. “My father broke away from the tradition of teaching daughters to stay at home,” she wrote. “He encouraged me, his daughter, to be free and fearless. That’s how I became strong.”

She remembered arguing with her father’s friends when they came over to visit. “Arguing with men like that,” she would write. “Hahahaha.” She added, “My dad did his own thing. He was remarkable.” Of course, so too was Ota herself.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Ota remembers coming home one day to find a bullet lodged in the wood by the family’s front door. First, her father was rounded up and sent to an internment camp in Bismarck, North Dakota. He would not survive the war. Later, Ota, her mother, and her siblings would be rounded up themselves. First they were sent to the Santa Anita race track — where they occupied a former horse stall. After that, they were forwarded to the internment camp in Gila River, Arizona. There, Ota’s mother — a disillusioned daughter of Japanese royalty, as Ota would describe her — experienced a nervous breakdown. Ota called the experience “a blessing in disguise,” explaining, “It made me stand up on my own two feet. I had to take on the role of the parent. But also to keep my head up and enjoy life.”

It was at the camp, Ota took dance classes from an accomplished professional dancer steeped in the acrobatic stylistics of modern dance innovator Martha Graham. That start would later equip Ota with the skills and verve to start a dance studio of her own.

It was also through those lessons that she happened to fall into the arms of Ken Ota, who would later become her husband and life partner. Ota himself was an accomplished multi-sport athlete from Lompoc. But him being five years younger, Miye never saw him as a romantic prospect. It was his kindness — reflexively helping older residents of the camp — she explained, that changed her heart. One day while practicing flying leaps in a dance class, Miye crashed through the floorboards. Ken Ota — who would woo Miye with persistent determination — just happened to be there and helped rescue her.

After being released from Gila River, the Otas would move briefly to Philadelphia, where Ota opened a beautician’s studio. The family moved back to Santa Barbara — Goleta specifically — in 1964 at the urging of a beautician school instructor from Santa Barbara who had maintained contact with her former pupil with encouraging and supportive letters during the Otas’ internment years.

The family would build their dance-and-martial-arts studio in Old Town Goleta out of cinder blocks. Hanging incongruously over the studio’s long stretch of exercise mats was the Ota’s glittering chandelier. The two enterprises became a mainstay of Goleta’s burgeoning small-business culture. There they taught not just skill, strength, and grace, but old-school self-respect, manners, and confidence. Little surprise that Miye would find herself a founding member of Goleta’s Chamber of Commerce.

In recent years, Miye’s husband would die at age 92; their son Steve would succumb to cancer at age 72.

Miye maintained her strength of spirit thanks, she said, to her “chi.” Over time, her body experienced the onslaught of age. By the time she turned 100, her spine left Miye resembling a human question mark. But in the midst of an interview at that time, Miye Ota suddenly jumped out of her seat — now a human exclamation mark — and began demonstrating her cha-cha-cha dance moves.

“Hey!” she would exclaim. “You have blue eyes.”