Ikeda and his mother had sailed to the United States from Japan in 1924, when he was just a year old, to join his father in Spokane.

The family soon moved to Tacoma, where “Tak” spent most of his life.

During World War II, though, Ikeda’s life was put on hold when he and his family, like tens of thousands of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, were interned by the federal government in camps far from home.

In the months after Pearl Harbor, the government looked on them as potential security risks at a time when there was much fear of a Japanese invasion.

Ikeda was never bitter about the experience, according to a friend, Tony Anderson.

But he believed the tragedy might have been avoided.

Ikeda “believed if you understand another person’s culture, and they understand yours, and respect it, you are less likely to go to war,” said another longtime friend, former Tacoma Mayor Karen Vialle.

“He wanted people to know you can transcend what government leaders do by building cultural understanding,” she said.

Ikeda was drafted into the U.S. Army out of his internment camp, and served as a translator in Japan during the occupation.

He returned to Tacoma and opened Family Cleaners on the Hilltop with relatives.

His dreams of a better world never left him.

In 1956, President Eisenhower created the Sister City Program to foster deeper cultural understanding between countries.

Ikeda jumped at the opportunity to form a link with the Japanese city of Kitakyushu, on his birth island of Kyushu.

He was a quiet, unassuming man, Vialle said, but when he set himself to a task, he’d get it done.

Due in large part to his efforts, Tacoma became sister cities with Kitakyushu in 1959. It was one of the first sister city partnerships.

Since then, there have been student and cultural exchanges, and economic ties with the sister city’s port, Vialle said.

In 1988, Ikeda harnessed his lifelong love of baseball to further the efforts. He set up an exchange program for high school baseball players.

From then until recent years, when Ikeda’s health began to fade, teams of Tacoma high school students traveled to Japan each year to play high school students in the sister city. There have been high school football exchanges, too.

“Over 800 young men had the opportunity to exchange with people of different countries,” said Anderson, who ran the program for many years.

Before he became ill, Ikeda dreamed of expanding the program to include Korea and China, Vialle said.

His lifelong work earned Ikeda high praise – he was recognized by the emperor of Japan for helping build relationships between Japan and the United States.

In the 1990s, Ikeda wrote the conclusion to a friend’s book about the Japanese community.

In it, he said “We want the world to know about the lessons we have learned during our lives. We do not want to see mass hysteria again imprison any group of people, either in body or in spirit.”

M. Alexander Otto: 253-597-8616