Ruth Sato

Ruth Sato (1904–1992) was a Broadway chorus dancer, gossip columnist, musician promoter and nightclub manager. She was known as the first Japanese chorus girl on Broadway, where she worked for 20 years. She worked for about ten years as a gossip columnist and musician promoter and for 25 years managing Jazz, Ltd., a Chicago Dixieland jazz nightclub, with her husband, Bill Reinhardt.

Ruth was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York to a Japanese father, Masazo Sato, and an Irish mother, Grace Bedeliah McIntyre. She said in the press that she inherited her Japanese father's stoicism and her Irish mother's volatility. Her father was a successful art importer, florist and antique dealer in Manhattan. Ruth is related to the 39th Prime Minister of Japan, Eisaku Satō. While Ruth lived with her parents in Manhattan, her father took her on many trips to Japan for her to learn her cultural heritage. In high school Ruth's ambition was to be a school teacher (she studied education for less than a year at Barnard College in New York). Her vocational guide enlightened Ruth that her status as a Japanese teacher in a white country may not be taken seriously. The guide inquired: "What school do you think might hire you?" On the advice of this guide and her father, Ruth became a dancer. Ruth liked French and Russian literature and she read James Joyce, Marcel Proust and the Goncourt brothers. In her youth she was fascinated with American entertainment but dismissive of Japanese artifacts.

When in 1950 Ruth asked a reporter, "Why should I bring kids into the world to bat their heads against a wall?" she metaphorically suggests that children cannot rationalize society's prejudice against their mixed race origin. Ruth's Irish mother, Della, was ostracized by her family when she married Ruth's Japanese father, Masazo. To ensure that parents of white children whom Masazo's children socialized with did not worry about them marrying an oriental person in the future, Masazo moved his family frequently. The resultant feeling of unsettledness lasted throughout Ruth's life.