KAILUA-KONA — In 1938, Norman Sakata, then a young teenager in Holualoa, was sent to live with his grandmother.
His grandfather, he said, had gone overseas for two years, leaving him to take care of the kupuna, who had suddenly gone blind at age 34.
“How she became blind, I don’t know,” Sakata said. ‘“All of a sudden, she became blind without knowing.”
She lost all her sight while pregnant. Already a mother to four daughters, her fifth child would finally be a baby boy, something that made his grandmother “so happy,” Sakata said.
But taking care of his grandmother showed him the “hardship that blind people go through.”
He’s taken that lesson with him throughout his life. In nearly six decades of being a member of the Lions Club and almost four decades of being a trustee for the Hawaii Lions Eye Bank, Sakata’s raised more than half a million dollars for the organization.
Last week, he received a check for the eye bank for $21,000 from the May Mitchell Royal Foundation. The foundation has helped support the eye bank for decades now.
“It’s through supporters like that we can carry on the work of the Hawaii Lions eye bank,” Sakata said.
The eye bank’s goal is to recover tissue that can be used in corneal surgeries to help restore sight for local residents, said Greg Ayau, chairman of the Hawaii Lions Eye Bank.
If they can’t find a local recipient, the tissue can be sent to the mainland for surgery or for research.
While Sakata was caring for his grandmother, he noticed something about her habits.
“One thing I noticed, she was always praying. I mean, always praying,” Sakata said.
So he asked her about it.
“She told me she was praying to ask God to give her sight for one minute before she died so she could see her only son,” Sakata said.
His grandmother, however, never regained her sight before dying at age 93.
“She lived in a world of darkness for 60 years,” Sakata said, adding that his grandmother kept up a positive attitude throughout her life.
“She was always jolly in spite of the fact that she was blind,” he said. His grandmother would tell him she was happy she had friends, family and the Lions Club to support her.
Friends and family, he said, he understood, but the Lions Club he was more curious about. The Lions, it turns out, had been inviting his grandmother to Christmas parties and getting her gifts.
“So I thought to myself, boy, if a small gesture like this can mean so much to a person who’s handicapped like her, I sure want to become a Lions Club member when I grow old,” he said.
This year marks 57 years of being a member, “with perfect attendance,” Sakata added with a laugh.
Ayau characterized Sakata as “the epitome of being a Lion.”
And the support of the May Mitchell Royal Foundation is all the result of a chance meeting between Sakata and the daughter of the foundation’s namesake.
In 1982, a physician who served as an adviser for the Hawaii Lions Eye Bank called Sakata, who was at the time the chairman of the eye bank, after a patient had asked about any potential organizations that support programs related to sight conservation and blindness.
That conversation led to a meeting between Sakata and Ruth Lishman, formerly of Kona, from the foundation.
During that meeting, Sakata spoke about his experience with his grandmother and a month or so later Sakata received an envelope with a check enclosed.
“I opened it and said, ‘How generous of them to send me $1,000,” Sakata said. “I looked again and it was not $1,000; it was for $10,000.”
Every year since, for 34 years, the eye bank has been receiving support from the foundation.
Ayau added his own appreciation for the donors.
“They’re still providing support,” he said of the May Mitchell Royal Foundation. “That’s a testament of faith.”
Sakata’s efforts with the eye bank extend beyond raising money for the facility.
He said he’s also personally carried 60 corneas for transplant operations between the airport and hospital. Sakata’s uncle, the sole son of Sakata’s blind grandmother, also became deeply invested in the Lions Club’s efforts to care for the blind.
The uncle, Yasuki Nakagawa, was among the first to push for the creation of the eye bank.
Even though the program wasn’t established by the time he died, Nakagawa still ended up contributing in a big way.
“He became one of the first Lions to donate his eyes,” he said. It was very rare, Sakata said, for a 68-year-old to have two suitable corneas for transplant.
After Nakagawa died, there were two Kona residents around his age who needed cornea transplants: one, a man who had lost an eye in a construction accident and later lost sight in his other eye. The other, a woman who had gradually been losing her sight over a span of seven years.
Following Nakagawa’s death, his family held funeral services at the Kona Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Kealakekua. At the exact minute services began, Sakata said, Dr. Robert Young began the transplant surgery to restore sight for the recipients of Nakagawa’s eyes.
That doctor, Sakata explained, would go on to be the same man to set up the meeting between Lishman and Sakata.
And the rest, as they say, is history.