During his time as a student at Kōnan High School from 1926 to 1929, Sakata attended a lecture given by the influential physicist Jun Ishiwara.

Sakata also became closely acquainted with Katō Tadashi, who would later co-translate Friedrich Engels's 1883 unfinished work Dialectics of Nature into Japanese.

When he was a second year student, Yoshio Nishina, a granduncle-in-law of Sakata, gave a lecture on quantum mechanics at the Kyoto Imperial University.

Sakata and Inoue solved these puzzles by identifying the cosmic ray particle as a daughter charged fermion produced in the π± decay.

They then discussed the decay of the Yukawa particle, Sakata and Inoue predicted correct spin assignment for the muon, and they also introduced the second neutrino.

The English printing of Sakata-Inoue's two-meson theory paper was delayed until 1946,[7] one year before the experimental discovery of π → μν decay.

In 1962, Maki, Nakagawa and Sakata,[22] and also Katayama, Matumoto, Tanaka and Yamada[23] accommodated the two distinct types of neutrino into the composite model framework.

The 2008 physics Nobel laureates Yoichiro Nambu, Toshihide Maskawa and Makoto Kobayashi, who received their awards for work on symmetry breaking, all came under his tutelage and influence.

Several of the authors of the Nagoya model embraced the philosophy of dialectical materialism, and he discusses the role that such metaphysical commitments play in physical theorizing.

Both theoretical and experimental developments that generated great interest in Japan, and ultimately stimulated Kobayashi and Maskawa's 1973 work, went almost entirely unnoticed in the U.S.

The episode exemplifies both the importance of untestable "themata" in developing new theories, and the difficulties that may arise, when two parts of a research community work in relative isolation from one another.

[26] In September 1970, Hideki Yukawa politely wrote to Waller informing him that Sakata had been ill when the nomination was written; since then, his condition had worsened significantly.

He, then, in the name of leading Japanese particle physicists, asked to know what the Nobel committee thought of Sakata's merits, for that would perhaps bring them consolation.