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As he has done for years, the slightly built, 90-year-old farmer treads the long rows of celery, inspecting the crop that thrives in the heavy black soil of his Costa Mesa fields. Occasionally, close to harvest time, he slashes off a stalk and takes a bite to test its quality. In another field, he picks a head of cabbage and tears off a leaf for inspection. That is how a farmer nurtures his crop. It is a task--rather, a labor of love--that has not changed with time. Other things do change. And for Katsumasa (Roy) Sakioka, it is more than just the slowness in his gait that has changed over the decades. From the vegetable fields that he still walks, Sakioka can see a hotel under construction, a large new luxury apartment complex and several office high-rises. Projects abound in development-rich Orange County, many of them on property that Sakioka and his family own or have joined a partnership to develop. The Sakiokas have helped change the face of Orange County. As a result, the nonagenarian, who still is uncomfortable conversing in English, has profited immensely. Although family members won’t divulge their net worth or various business arrangements, combined information from sources who do business with them shows their real estate holdings alone to exceed $360 million.

The urbanization of Orange County in which Sakioka has played a key part has transformed him from vegetable farmer to patriarch of one of Southern California’s wealthiest families. But family members and others say the man who in 1916 emigrated from Japan to the United States and eventually made his fortune in real estate has retained the work ethic and personal habits of his youth.

Those who know Sakioka marvel at his adroitness in business. In real estate dealings, Sakioka is known as a loner who, after careful study, makes up his own mind and doesn’t rely on consultants. He is notorious for holding out as long as necessary for what he believes is the right price.

A longtime business associate recalls that once when the city of Huntington Beach had land for sale, Roy Sakioka got it for $6,028 an acre. About a year later, he turned down a Beverly Hills investor who was offering to pay him $18,000 an acre for the same land. Instead, he accepted an offer of $25,000 an acre from yet another investor.

Although Sakioka says he has been in “semi-retirement” for 30 years while other family members have assumed greater roles, a business executive who deals with him says, “The old man calls the shots.”

But through all the high-powered deals, Sakioka has never forsaken his love of the land.

To this day, friends say, the trunk of his Cadillac frequently carries a shovel, celery knife and rubber boots in case he sees farm work that needs immediate attention.

ROY SAKIOKA KEEPS HIS own counsel, and when he told his story recently to The Times, family members say it was the first interview he has granted to anyone in the media.

He is the youngest of a family of six children born in a farming village on the small Japanese island of Shikoku. Sakioka says it was his father who instilled in him the importance of investing his money in real estate as a hedge against inflation.

“My father said, ‘You never forget it: Inflation will never be stopped,’ ” Sakioka recalled. Besides, he added with a smile, “cash is easy to spend,” while land is a kind of forced savings account.

Sakioka left his childhood home in 1916 to travel to the United States, which, he had heard, was a land of opportunity. He joined his oldest brother, Katsuma, who had already settled in Glendale and married. Katsuma--19 years older than Roy--and sister-in-law Masai adopted him as their own son.

Roy and his brother farmed on land they had leased in Glendale until the land was subdivided for houses and they moved to West Los Angeles.

In 1920, Sakioka returned to Japan to marry his childhood friend, Tomio. He brought her back to the United States, and they began their family of three boys and three girls. For the next 22 years, they were exclusively tenant farmers in West Los Angeles and owned no land.

After war was declared on Japan, the Sakiokas were sent with other Japanese-Americans to the Manzanar internment camp in Bishop. When they were ousted from Southern California in 1942, they left all their farm tools and machinery with a friend who agreed to take care of them.

They stayed in the camp about 16 months, until Sakioka heard from a friend that Japanese-Americans were wanted to harvest sugar beets in Utah. They received permission to leave the camp and drive to Utah, with the understanding that they could not return to the West Coast until the war was over.

For the rest of the war, the Sakiokas worked in Utah at various jobs, mostly as contract farm laborers. Sakioka’s daughter Hisako, known as Betty, remembers picking peaches, plucking feathers from Thanksgiving turkeys and sewing military uniforms in a garment factory.

As soon as they got the go-ahead in 1946, all the Sakiokas returned home and resumed farming in West Los Angeles. Roy Sakioka’s eldest son Jack, now 68, had been attending the University of Utah, but he says he cut short his education at his father’s request. “He said, ‘No school. You have got to go to work.’ ”

ROY SAKIOKA SAYS HE decided to start buying land because he was tired of paying rent on the land he farmed. Because of laws then preventing Japanese immigrants from becoming citizens and barring non-citizens from buying land, Sakioka at first acquired land in the names of his American-born children.

Gradually, the family accumulated 80 acres in the Westside area then known as Sawtelle by making small down payments, borrowing the rest and working to pay off mortgages, Sakioka says.

The family’s move from Los Angeles to Orange County began in the late 1940s when a school district condemned about half of Sakioka’s 80 acres of farmland at Sawtelle and National boulevards for a junior high school.

Sakioka persuaded the school district to let him keep 5 acres at the intersection of the two thoroughfares to develop the West Dale community shopping center, which the family still owns.

In return for selling the remainder of the 80 acres for the school and a residential development, Sakioka got more farmland in Culver City, Venice and Gardena that he later swapped for even more acreage in Orange County.

Along the way, he also bought an office building on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills and another in downtown Santa Ana, both of which he still owns. “My old man’s idea was to diversify. You can’t depend on farming only,” Jack Sakioka says.

Roy Sakioka says he chose to buy land in Orange County beginning in 1947 because the heavy black soil was just what celery craves, and there was plenty of open space. Also, the land was cheaper than in Los Angeles County, where farming was being pushed out by schools and housing tracts.

And, as Sakioka frequently tells one of his grandsons, he learned from quietly attending public hearings that sewer service was about to be extended to the area where he planned to buy--a sure sign of development to come.

By 1960, the Sakiokas had reached the peak of their land holdings in Orange County, with 1,000 acres in Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach. The Sakioka farming operations were so immense in the county that the family maintained its own packing house and established a camp for Mexican farm workers behind Roy Sakioka’s home.

The Sakiokas now own about 270 acres in Orange County, 35 acres of which are currently in escrow. The rest of the land the family once owned in Orange County has either been condemned by government agencies for the development of utilities, roads and the Costa Mesa Freeway or sold or swapped by the Sakiokas for about 3,000 acres of undeveloped farmland in Ventura County, according to Jack Sakioka. He says the family farms about 1,000 of those acres and leases the remainder to tenant farmers.

The 74-acre Sakioka home farm--on acreage zoned for urban commercial and residential development--stretches from Roy Sakioka’s house on Sunflower Avenue in Costa Mesa to the San Diego Freeway.

Near the home farm, an urban center already is taking root along the San Diego Freeway in Costa Mesa on 85 acres that the Sakioka family has leased to two development firms.

So far, three 12-story office buildings, the Lakes apartments, the Beverly Heritage Hotel and a man-made lake have appeared on the former agricultural acreage. A Marriott Suites hotel is under construction, and there are plans for more office and residential development.

Last May, the family sold 43 acres on the northwest corner of MacArthur Boulevard and the Costa Mesa Freeway in Santa Ana. The plot will become part of a 62-acre project called MacArthur Place, the master plan of which calls for about 18 office buildings, another hotel, apartments, retail space and a 3-acre water garden.

Yet another 142 acres of strawberry and cabbage fields that the Sakiokas long have farmed in Fountain Valley are to be converted during the next decade into an industrial park. The family recently sold 30 of those acres in the planned industrial park to the city of Fountain Valley’s redevelopment agency.

BUT LONG BEFORE real estate holdings paved the road to riches in Southern California, Roy Sakioka had made a name for himself in farming. Betty Sakioka says that her father stood out in the local farming community because he employed experimental cross-planting to develop his own strain of celery.

Jack Sakioka says that his father was among the first farmers to send vegetables to the East Coast in refrigerated freight cars in order to garner a better price when the Southern California market was saturated.

Most of the time, Sakioka sold his vegetables through a broker. But sometimes he gambled and sent his produce east by railroad, without any guarantee of a sale, while he bargained on the telephone with Midwest and Eastern commodity buyers. His problem with English somehow posed no barrier. “He used farmers’ language,” Betty says, the terms and figures that farmers universally understand. Sakioka’s friends and relatives say that he has always demonstrated an extraordinary grasp of and memory for figures, whether pertaining to dates, acreage, prices or profits.

He even has a printer machine in his house to keep track of the fluctuating prices and quantities of produce hitting the market in various parts of the country.

Roy Sakioka ascribes much of his success to having been “just lucky.” But his closest friends and business associates say he has a special vision and shrewdness that have enabled him to make the most of his opportunities.

Many old-time farmers sold their land when their children entered other occupations. But Roy Sakioka and his children pulled together, continuing to farm as a way to hang onto their land while it grew in value.

Roy Sakioka has repeatedly swapped pieces of farmland for increasingly larger parcels as development dogged his steps. “It seemed wherever he purchased, the freeways would wrap around it,” Betty Sakioka says.

When Roy Sakioka bought his Costa Mesa property in February, 1955, he was impressed by the proximity and convenience of Newport Boulevard, which he planned to use to transport his harvests to market. Since then, the Costa Mesa and San Diego freeways have been built, bordering his land on two sides.

Genji-Gene Kawamura, a longtime friend of the Sakioka family in Orange County, says that Roy Sakioka has been “extremely farsighted” in choosing what land parcels to acquire. “He kept trading land for land wherever he saw a piece that had a future.”

The Sakioka real estate empire is all the more impressive because of the patriarch’s entry into the United States in 1916 as an 18-year-old who could speak no English. Even today he doesn’t feel comfortable conversing in English and sometimes prefers to have his children on hand to help him communicate when he meets with strangers.

“I admire the hell out of him. He is an American success story,” says Shurl Curci, chief executive officer of Transpacific Development Co., which has developed Sakioka land in Costa Mesa.

When Sakioka came to the United States, Curci says, “it wasn’t popular to be brown, slanty-eyed and not speak the language. He climbed the insurmountable mountain.”

THE $360 MILLION figure ascribed to the Sakiokas’ land holdings is based on an estimate by a Coldwell Banker official that land near South Coast Plaza is worth about $1 million an acre. And it may be a conservative estimate in light of the Sakiokas’ recent sale of the 43 acres in Santa Ana for the MacArthur Place development. That deal brought the Sakiokas $40 million in cash, plus participation in profits as members of the purchasing partnership.

The estimate also is based on a Coldwell Banker expert’s opinion that the 3,000 acres of farmland that the family owns in Ventura County ranges in value from $20,000 to $130,000 an acre, as well as an estimate by the Sakiokas’ partner in the Fountain Valley industrial park that the 112-acre holding the family still owns there is worth about $54 million.

Jack Sakioka says his father considered to be a bargain price the $533,000 an acre the city of Fountain Valley’s redevelopment agency recently paid the family for 30 acres in the planned industrial park.

In addition, the family owns a shopping center in West Los Angeles, office buildings in Santa Ana and Beverly Hills and a trailer park in Riverside County.

The family’s accomplishments have been so impressive that the Sakioka farm was placed on the itinerary of Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita when he visited Southern California in early February. Rain forced the prime minister to cancel his visit to the farm, but Japan’s ambassador to the United States and the Japanese consul general showed up.

In land deals, the Sakiokas have benefited greatly from booming Orange County real estate prices. Roy Sakioka recalls that when he began buying land in the county in 1949, he paid $1,420 an acre, a far cry from the $1 million-an-acre estimated value of the family’s acreage in Costa Mesa.

Al Sparlis, a Coldwell Banker agent who has done business with Roy Sakioka for 28 years, says Roy has become adept at juggling farm work with real estate wheeling and dealing. But farming always comes first.

Sparlis recalls that one meeting he had scheduled with Sakioka on a multimillion-dollar deal was delayed while Sakioka tried to sort out different grades of cucumbers that had gotten mixed up.

“It was more important (to Sakioka) to get the right cucumbers to market, because his name was on the boxes,” Sparlis says.

Sometimes, people like Sparlis end up meeting Sakioka on his farmland to talk business. Once when Sparlis was consulting with Sakioka in a field, he started wondering why Sakioka had such a wry smile on his face--but not for long. Sparlis suddenly noticed that irrigation water was streaming down the furrows “and there was no escape” for him in his Brooks Brothers suit. So he pulled off his shoes and socks, rolled up his trousers and tried to look nonchalant.

Tales of Sakioka’s business acumen are the stuff of which legends and fortunes are made. Sparlis recalled the time in 1978 when Sakioka swapped about 35 acres in Santa Ana, where the Hutton Centre office complex now sits, for 1,353 acres in Oxnard.

Sparlis says other prospective buyers of the Oxnard acreage were hesitating while they consulted various real estate experts.

By contrast, Roy Sakioka simply took a stroll on the property. He looked at the freeway frontage, the level farmland and the access to utilities and railroad service that would help generate future development. A man of few words, he said to Sparlis: “We like this kind (of land),” and within a couple of days, he had secured the land in escrow.

A Chicago company later came back to bid, but it was too late. Sakioka subsequently turned down the company’s offer to buy half the land from him at twice what what the entire acreage was worth when he acquired it, Sparlis says.

One instance when Sakioka probably shouldn’t have held out, Sparlis says, was when he rejected the advances of Sears, Roebuck & Co. and May Co. executives who wanted to build a shopping mall on his property in Costa Mesa. Sakioka contended that their offer for the land was too cheap.

So the department store executives instead struck a deal with Sakioka’s neighbors, the Segerstrom family, who developed the extremely lucrative South Coast Plaza retail center.

In retrospect, Sakioka says he has no regrets. After all, he points out, the glitter of South Coast Plaza has greatly boosted the value of his own adjoining property, which is now in various stages of development.

THROUGH THE YEARS, Roy Sakioka has shunned publicity and chosen a modest--some friends call it “frugal”--life style for himself, his wife and their six children, who have been taught to be hard-working and unassuming.

Jack Sakioka frequently stops by Kuido Farm Supply in Santa Ana, with mud from the fields still on his boots, to shoot the breeze with old friends. He can do this, he says, because his own son--Roy, 38, named after his grandfather--is taking up some of the farming load.

Paul Kuido, the proprietor, has known the Sakiokas for many years. He says that the elder Roy Sakioka once explained to him the importance of humility by observing: “When you look over a rice field, as the grain matures, the whole vine tends to bow.”

A glutton for work, Roy Sakioka has no interest in the luxuries that generally accompany financial success. He says he has no need for gated communities such as Bel-Air, although he could easily afford them. Instead, he continues to live in a single-story, ranch-style house that he bought in 1955 from the late Harvey Bear, a member of one of the county’s pioneering farming families. The house now faces Sunflower Avenue, a busy thoroughfare, in a neighborhood that has sprouted apartment complexes.

The family’s business is conducted in an office built onto the side of Jack Sakioka’s house, which is next to his father’s.

Roy’s favorite relaxation is betting on thoroughbreds at the race tracks. He and his wife, Tomio, have a private box at Santa Anita, and he scrutinizes racing forms as assiduously as he studies real estate.

That is the only indulgence Sakioka allows himself. He buys his clothes off the rack. He and his wife don’t even own a dishwasher, and they hired a housekeeper, at the insistence of their children, only five years ago. Before that, Tomio insisted on cleaning her own house because she and her husband wanted to be “independent,” daughter Betty says.

Jack Sakioka says that his father originally had planned to make his fortune in the United States and then return to Japan with his family. For that reason, he says, the three older children were sent to Japan to learn to speak Japanese.

But long before World War II, Jack Sakioka says, his father decided that America would be his permanent home (although he routinely travels to Japan every two years to visit relatives and friends).

Sakioka has been quietly active in the Japanese-American community, contributing money without fanfare to charities that include a Japanese retirement home in Boyle Heights and the Japanese-American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles.

Rev. Noriaki Ito, minister at the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles, says that for as long as he can remember the Sakioka family has been supportive of that institution, which is affiliated with a temple where Roy Sakioka worshiped as a boy in Japan.

Roy Sakioka in 1976 led the fund-raising drive to build a temple in the Little Tokyo area of Los Angeles. Jack Sakioka says his father has given $250,000 to the temple over the past 10 years. Jack currently is spearheading a drive to build a sister temple in Costa Mesa.

Nor have Japanese-American institutions alone benefited from Sakioka philanthropy. Roy Sakioka gave $100,000 to help build the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

THE SAKIOKAS’ SPOKESMAN in the real estate community and in dealings with city governments is George Sakioka, Roy’s 29-year-old grandson, who notes lightheartedly that he is the only member of the family who goes to work in a suit and tie.

In all, Roy Sakioka has 17 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. So far, only a small number of the younger Sakiokas are active in the business.

Roy’s two oldest sons, Jack and John, run the farm operations in Orange County, and his youngest, Arthur, supervises the farming in Ventura County. Betty manages the office, and two grandsons, Roy and Craig, work in the fields.

Roy’s two remaining daughters, Masako and Nobuko, are not involved in the family business. Masako and her husband operate a farm and nursery elsewhere in Orange County, and Nobuko works for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Jack says he expects more of the grandchildren, who are now in their 20s and 30s, to join the family business as it diversifies.

“Little by little, we are getting into office buildings and shopping centers,” he says. But the family will be very careful about what steps it takes into untested business waters, he says. “We are learning and studying.”

Roy Sakioka, however, seems less than eager to become an independent developer. So much responsibility, he says, would be “a headache.” But, when asked whether his family plans to develop the 74 acres of land behind his house that is still being farmed, he said flatly: “I would like to sell the whole thing for the right price.”

No one in the family disputes Roy Sakioka’s final authority. “The boss is here,” Betty says, nodding fondly toward her father.

Despite his advanced age, Roy Sakioka hasn’t handed over the reins of the family business to anyone. He often attends several business meetings a day.

Jack Sakioka says that twice a month he and his two brothers, sister Betty and nephew George meet to talk about the business. Everyone gives their opinions, but Roy Sakioka has the last word.

One of his father’s decisions that Jack Sakioka says he once questioned was the purchase of land in Ventura County that seemed to be decades away from development.

Roy Sakioka’s answer, his son says, showed his concern for future generations. “He told me were are buying the land not for you or for your children but for your grandsons.”