Topic: News & Picture: Remember Harold Sakata?

[Don Weideman]

HAROLD SAKATA: Olympic Weightlifter
 



In 1936, Sakata dropped out of school to help work the family’s coffee farm. The following year, he started paid employment at a sugar plantation located about 75 miles away from his home, after which he went to the island of Lanai to work on a pineapple plantation. He then moved to Maui to do more agricultural work, and in 1938 he ended up in Honolulu, a city he called home for the rest of life.

At age eighteen, Sakata stood 5’8" but weighed only 113 pounds. After seeing some physical culture magazines he decided to start lifting weights "so I’d look as good as the other guys." This took him to the Nuuanu YMCA, which was Honolulu’s main Asian YMCA. (YMCAs were racially segregated then.) The gymnasium portion opened in May 1922, and was located on the corner of Fort and Vineyard. The current building is across the street; the old building was sited on what is today a Safeway parking lot.

At the YMCA, Sakata’s weightlifting partners included Emerick Ishikawa and Richard Tom. Ishikawa was from Maui while Tom was from the Honolulu suburb of Palama. After about a year of serious training Sakata had gained about twenty pounds. Inspired by this success he started entering local lifting contests and in 1941 he won the Territorial light-heavyweight championship. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor stopped travel to the mainland but over the next two years Sakata won several more Oahu championships; in June 1943, at 165 pounds, he was pressing 250, snatching 240, and clean and jerking 310, for a total of 800 pounds.

In January 1944, a photo of Sakata and Tom appeared in Bob Hoffman’s magazine Strength and Health. Soon after, Sakata joined the US Army, where he was assigned to the 1399th Engineer Construction Battalion. Known as the Chowhounds, this was a Japanese American unit activated in April 1944 at Schofield Barracks, outside Honolulu. General Douglas MacArthur twice requested that the 1399th be sent to the Philippines but instead the War Department kept the battalion in Hawai’i building water tanks, warehouses, airfields, and roads. Assigned to Special Services -- that is, the unit gym -- Sakata spent his time in the Army lifting weights.

Following his discharge, Sakata remained in Honolulu. Although the Nuuanu YMCA had a good weight room, it didn’t have a regular trainer or coach. Instead the weightlifters simply read magazines (notably Strength and Health) and then tried different things. In essence, the Hawaiian weightlifters were self-coached regarding both technique and diet until the Korean American physician Richard You came along during the early 1950s. Nevertheless, some of these men, most notably Richard Tom, Richard Tomita, Robert Tong, and Gilbert Lum, were very serious about their lifting, and because he was both strong and gregarious, Sakata soon became their leader.

Training took place after work, which normally meant between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. Mondays through Friday. By modern standards their technique was not horribly sophisticated. For example, most lifters then used the split technique when cleaning the bar. Now they use the squat technique pioneered by Tommy Kono during the late 1940s. "I had this fear of dropping the bar on my front leg while doing the split, even though it never happened," Kono told interviewer Brian Niiya in 1999. "So I tried the squat and it felt very natural, and I felt like I could lift more that way." And, as Kono was among best lifters in the world during the early 1950s, first the York Barbell team and then everyone else followed suit.

Another difference between then and now was that then there was little cross training. There were boxers and wrestlers, for example, who trained at the YMCA, but like the weightlifters, they kept to themselves.

During a tournament held at the Nuuanu YMCA on November 1, 1946, Sakata set a Hawaiian record in both the snatch and the clean-and-jerk, plus an unofficial world record in the press. The following year he also won the Mr. Hawaii physique title. Training for Mr. Hawaii required a different regimen than training for the Olympic-style AAU championships. For example, the Olympic-style lifters didn’t do curls.

In December 1965, Sakata told a reporter from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that he succeeded in both aspects of the iron game because hard work was nothing new to him: "I didn’t have an easy time working in the coffee fields and bringing home the money. Lots of times I wanted toys and wondered why life was so hard."

In Honolulu, Henry Koizumi, athletic director of the Nuuanu YMCA, suggested that Sakata and Tom organize a weightlifting team. The goal was to place well in the US Nationals, which were held in Dallas, Texas, on the weekend of June 20-21, 1947. Sakata placed first in the 181-pound class with a total lift of 800 pounds. Tom meanwhile placed first in the 123-pound division with a total lift of 610 pounds.

After the Nationals, Sakata and Tom went to York, Pennsylvania. There they visited Emerick Ishikawa, who had moved to the mainland shortly before World War II and then become a national-class member of the York Barbell Club. Bob Hoffman, president of the York Barbell Company and the de facto head of the US Olympic weightlifting program, gave the visiting Hawaiians jobs in his barbell factory so they ended up staying in York until the World Championships, which were held in Philadelphia in August 1947. During these championships Tom took second and Sakata took fourth. After that Tom and Sakata returned to Honolulu.

Knowing that he had a good chance at making the US Olympic team, Sakata trained hard during the 1947-1948 season. As a result, he was ready for the US Senior Nationals, which were held in Los Angeles on May 13-14, 1948, and ended up taking second overall. This in turn earned him an invitation to the Olympic tryouts held in New York City on July 9, where he placed second to York Barbell Club’s Stan Stancyzk. This was good enough for a berth on the US squad, and in London Sakata again took second to Stanczyk, thus earning an Olympic silver medal. "It was the biggest thrill of my life," the 28-year old Sakata told Pacific Citizen afterwards. "I certainly didn’t expect to finish that high against the world’s best."

[Chris Kim]

Harold Sakata, the man who would later become known as Oddjob!  :D