Early Life
The daughter of Japanese-born parents, Takata grew up on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where her father worked in the sugar cane fields. She left school after second or third grade and went to work in the plantation house. She was given increased duties as she grew older and was eventually was put in charge of the other household staff.
On 10 March 1917, she married Saichi Takata, the bookkeeper of the plantation where she was employed. They had two daughters together before October 1930, when her husband died at age thirty-four in Tokyo, where he had gone for lung cancer treatment. After this, Takata worked hard to support her family on her own, and this contributed to her suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a variety of serious gastrointestinal ailments and severe depression leading to a nervous breakdown.
Read more about this topic: Hawayo Takata
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