In the mid-1980s he established the Manzanar Project[1] aimed at attacking the planet's most critical problems as poverty, hunger, environmental pollution, and global warming through low tech biotechnological methods in salt water deserts that can be transferred to the indigenous inhabitants.
Sato was the son of an Issei (Japanese-born immigrant) father and a first generation American born Nisei mother in Los Angeles, California.
He was raised on Terminal Island, East San Pedro, where a substantial Japanese American community had developed prior to World War II.
After graduation from Manzanar High School in 1944, he attended Central College in Pella, Iowa for a year while working at the Wakonda Country Club[2] before enlisting in the United States Army.
In 1992 soon after Upstate Biotechnology, Inc. became profitable, private interests acquired control of the company and the mission was diverted from support and endowment of The W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center.
The project aimed at making salt water and desert combinations productive through application of the simplest, low cost rational scientific approaches had its first prototype in the Salton Sea in southern California.
Through contacts developed in the field that started as modest grassroots relief efforts for suffering remote villagers in Eritrea during the late stages of its war of independence with Ethiopia, Sato solidified and focused the approaches behind the current Manzanar Project that centers in the Eritrean desert on the Red Sea.
Sato's first working village prototype is Hargigo, on whose nearby coastline construction of the forests provides jobs for both men and women, the latter of which was unheard of in the local area prior to the project.
[3] In 1982 Sato share Brandeis University's Rosenstiel Award with subsequent 1986 Nobel prize winners, biochemist Stanley Cohen and Rita Levi-Montalcini, and in 1984 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his contributions to cell biology.
The annual award with a cash prize of $100,000 recognizes men and women who are breaking new ground in areas which advance human knowledge and well-being.
[4] In 2005 Sato received the Blue Planet Award, a cash prize of 50 million Japanese yen, sponsored by the Asahi Glass Foundation, for developing a new mangrove planting technology in Eritrea and through its utilization thus showing the possibility of building a sustainable local community in the poorest area of the world.