Fundamental to both judo and aikido is the art of the fall. During Kenji Ota’s 52 years as Goleta’s premier sensei in both martial arts, he taught more than 10,000 students how to fall gently, safely, and, above all, confidently. Or, as his wife, Miye Ota, described it, “to land as a cat.” Ken Ota, who died in November at age 92, operated out of a dojo he and his wife built — cinderblock by cinderblock — on Magnolia Avenue in the heart of Old Town Goleta. The structure was joined at the hip to Miye's thriving beauty salon, where she made matrons of Goleta's pioneering families look like the movie stars found in her waiting room's glamor magazines.
When the Otas opened the studio in the early 1960s, large cornfields and tomato patches lay within easy spitting distance. Over time the area morphed from rustic-rural to aggressively unpretentious urban-utilitarian. Across from the dojo stands a self-serve car wash. Down the street, a Mexican evangelical church thumps out God-fearing rock music, a no-frills gym caters to the hard-core muscle crowd, and a hip-n-healthy restaurant seeks a toehold with the young millennial market.
The Otas were not content merely to open a dojo for martial arts; they opened their Cultural School, too, for ballroom dance, cotillion, manners, and etiquette. Drooping from the ceiling directly above the training mats is the dojo’s famously incongruous chandelier. A sign on the wall ticks off five basic rules of conduct. “Respect your parents, instructor and the law,” reads the first. The last commands, “Always be a gentleman.”
The Magnolia Avenue school is where Kenji Ota — an award-winning ballroom dancer — started, but he expanded to Cal Poly, the YMCA, Montecito Country Club, and UCSB. At the latter, he was hired to teach judo in the early 1970s. The program was expected to fold, but it thrived under Ota’s direction. It grew to include a groundbreaking program for women, bringing some of the foremost women judo stars as teachers. He did the same for the university's moribund ballroom dance program, also still going strong. Both are now taught by his 67-year-old son, Steven Ota. It wasn't until two years ago that old age forced Ken Ota to give up any pretense at teaching.
None of this did Ota ever intentionally set out to do. Events conspired. One step begat another. Opportunity presented. And Ota responded as one would expect of someone masterful in the art of falling. “Sensei never went after things,” his wife explained. “He just fell into them.” In so doing, Kenji Ota — gruff, warm, commanding, and relentlessly generous — would become second father to countless students, his dojo a second home to many more. At a standing-room only memorial service held in the Cultural School in January, Steve Ota would say, “He was a guy from Lompoc. He taught a bit of dancing. He taught a little bit of judo. But he had this ability to look inside people and see the good and the potential.”
Kenji Ota was born in Lompoc, one of four kids and the son of Japanese immigrant farmers. That made Ota a nisei, or second-generation Japanese American. Lompoc held about 100 such families, who had their own agricultural co-op, church, general store, gas station, and judo dojo.
As a child, he'd suffered rheumatic fever, and, at one point a doctor told him the disease so weakened his heart he’d never be able to exercise. “He said, ‘The heck with the doctor,’ and went out and got barbells and became very muscular,” said Miye. By high school, Ota was avidly pursuing judo and body-building. The chief photograph at his memorial service was of a radiant young man in blue swim trunks — glorying at the beach in his strength and beauty.
As a teenager, Ota played football. He hung out with the team and hit as many barbecues as possible. On occasion, his wife said, Ota and his friends would raid watermelons from his own father’s farm. “His father would have given them the melons,“ she said, “but [Ken] thought it was more fun to steal them.” His father, Yasuke Ota, Miye recalled, took full advantage of the steelhead trout then coursing up the lower reaches of the Santa Ynez River; they swam in such abundance he could spear them out of the water with a pitchfork, a technique known as “Portuguese fly-fishing.”
In 1941, the Lompoc High School football team on which Ota played did something no other Lompoc team had ever done; they beat Santa Maria High School. "This was a big deal,” declared Lompoc journalist, sports writer, and historian John McReynolds, who wrote the book Vanished: Lompoc’s Japanese. “To avoid violence after the game, the Lompoc players had to get into cars and hurry home,” said McReynolds.
But as of December 7, no one cared who won that game. That was the day Japanese bombers wiped out Pearl Harbor, triggering America’s entry into World War II. At that point Ota became simply a Jap. Ota told McReynolds that he was working at a gas station at J and Ocean streets, pumping gas, when word of the attack hit. “A bunch of cars started honking their horns. They’d pull into the station, see him, and then hit the gas,” McReynolds said.
On February 23, 1942, a Japanese sub launched a few shells at Ellwood Beach. Only an oil company tool shed was destroyed, but the attack had broader ramifications. The process of rounding up issei (first-generation Japanese in America) and nisei families had already begun, throughout Lompoc and the entire Pacific Coast. After the Ellwood incident, it took off with a vengeance. By April, the Ota family — like most of Lompoc’s Japanese — were packed onto buses and hauled off to Santa Anita Race Track, where each family was assigned a horse stall. Soon after, they were taken to the Gila River internment camp in Arizona. Gila River had barbed-wire fences, a guard tower, and next to no privacy. It was also where Ota would meet his future wife, who grew up just outside Guadalupe near Oso Flaco.
