A prominent figure in the Los Angeles art scene prior to World War II, his career was interrupted by the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.

[1] After his father was forced to file for bankruptcy and close the hardware store in 1925,[2] the family moved to Los Angeles, where Date graduated from Polytechnic High School.

[2] He was a member of the Independents, a group of Los Angeles area artists who rejected the tenets of modernism, and worked closely with Synchromism co-founder Stanton Macdonald-Wright and others in the avant-garde movement.

[1] During World War II, he was "evacuated" from the West Coast with other Japanese Americans, first to the Santa Anita Assembly Center in California and then to the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming.

He returned to Los Angeles briefly in 1947, to retrieve his pre-war artwork and hold a show at the Art Center School, but otherwise remained based in New York for the rest of his life.