13 Strings : When Kayoko Wakita strums the Japanese koto, its tones resonate with 2,200 years of tradition--and her own personal style.

Kayoko Wakita sat in her favorite room, the one that brings on thoughts of Zen masters, Glenn Miller, Manzanar, Betty Grable, traditional Japanese court music and Pablo Casals.

“Pablo Casals stayed right here in this room,” said Wakita, speaking in reverent tones about the famed cellist’s visit to her home in the early 1960s.

The room functions as her office and practice room in her home near downtown Los Angeles, and Wakita was preparing to play a piece on the koto, a long, slender, Japanese stringed instrument that has a heritage going back at least 2,200 years. On Friday her Wakita Koto Ensemble will perform a concert of traditional Japanese music at the Conejo Valley Art Museum in Thousand Oaks in connection with an exhibit of sculptures and ceramics made by artists working in the Japanese tradition.

“Mr. Casals was on his way to Japan for a concert and I asked him if he would like to stay with us on the stopover. He said he would be delighted, he did not like hotels. We took him to visit Disneyland, and he loved it.”

Koto music, Casals and Disneyland are representative of the wildly diverse cultural influences with which Wakita grew up in Los Angeles. It’s a emotional melting pot that she resisted as a girl, but one that she embraces and expresses through her music.

“It was a trip growing up the way I did,” Wakita, who looks considerably younger than her 60 years, said with a laugh. “But it gave me the freedom to be me. And I know it comes out in my music.”

This said, she placed square picks on two fingers of her right hand, tuned up a bit, and played a serene, modern piece called “Murmuring Waters,” by Shinichi Yuize.

Wakita is carrying on a family tradition. Her parents came to the United States in 1917 and shortly thereafter opened a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. “It was a Chinese restaurant,” Wakita said. “At that time, you couldn’t make money on a Japanese restaurant. Too exotic.”

For their own amusement and those of their fellow expatriates, her parents played music on the traditional Japanese instruments they had brought with them. Her mother specialized in the koto, which was introduced in Japan from China in the seventh century. (Koto-like instruments have been found in Chinese burial sites that are dated as far back as 200 B.C.).

Made out of a single piece of paulownia wood, a standard koto has 13 strings made of silk or a silk substitute. The strings are individually tuned with the use of movable bridges made of ivory or wood.

Her parents mostly played for informal get-togethers at home on weekends or in the kitchen of the restaurant after closing. But they were occasionally invited to play for a wider audience--Wakita recalled the night they played at the famed Coconut Grove nightclub in the early 1930s. Olivia De Havilland and Guy Lombardo were among those in the audience. “I can remember Olivia De Havilland taking my hand and talking to me,” Wakita said.

Although Wakita received koto lessons from her mother when she was a teen-ager, she wasn’t interested in traditional Japanese music. “I was saying, ‘This is square, this is so foreign!’ ” she said. “I was singing Glenn Miller pop songs, playing the piano, tap dancing.

“In fact, when we were in the camp, I used to sing at the dances.”

The camp was Manzanar, where her family was relocated in 1942 under the executive order that interned thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Because of their bulk, kotos were not easy to transport to the camps as part of the allowed baggage, but Wakita’s mother managed to pack a couple of them. “Other people made kotos out of whatever scrap of wood they could find up there,” Wakita said. “The sound was not good, but they managed.”

After 3 1/2 years in Manzanar, the family was released and they returned to Los Angeles to open another restaurant.

Wakita got a job doing office work at an elementary school and, because she is a talented mimic, she made extra money at movie studios dubbing dialogue. Wakita dubbed lines for Betty Grable and Sheree North, among others, and a number of Japanese characters for films such as “Geisha Boy” and “My Geisha.”

As her parents again became active in the Asian cultural community, their home became a meeting place for important Japanese musicians, artists and Zen masters. But still Wakita took little interest in traditional Japanese music--until she met Yasuko Nakashima, a famed Japanese koto player who was visiting the United States. “I was not that excited about koto before that,” Wakita said. “I thought it was just boring. Everyone had the same square tone, there was no personal expression. But then I heard her and I was in total awe.

“She was playing traditional music and her technical application was out of this world, but there was also interpretation, expression in her phrasing and her dynamics. It was an awakening.”

At Nakashima’s urging she took up the koto again and began practicing in earnest. Wakita earned a degree in Asian studies at USC and a master’s in music from Cal State L.A. “In those days you could only take Western music in school,” Wakita said, but she did her master’s thesis on the koto.

While she was in college she lived in Japan for a year and she came to know many internationally famous musicians, including Casals. She also became devoted to Zen meditation and studies.

Wakita teaches a course in the music of China, Japan and Korea at Los Angeles City College, where she also teaches Japanese civilization. Members of the jazz fusion group Hiroshima are among the students who have taken her music appreciation classes.

She and her father founded the Wakita ensemble in 1963--she played koto and he played shakuhachi, a bamboo flute-like traditional instrument. When her father died in 1979, Masakazu Yoshizawa, a well-known local shakuhachi musician whose work can be heard on many movie sound tracks, took his place in the group.

Rounding out the trio for the Conejo Valley Art Museum concert will be Takako Osumi, who plays the shamisen, a stringed instrument that resembles the banjo in size.

Wakita practices at least an hour a day and she is proud that she can bring subtle, personal expression even to classic pieces by Yatsuhachi (1614-1685), the best-known of the early koto composers.

Some traditional players disapprove. “They say, ‘Your playing sounds different than anyone else’s,’ and I would say ‘That’s because it comes from me.’ ” Wakita said. But after years of practice at the koto, she recognizes at least some of the rewards of the single-minded traditional Japanese musicians who were devoted to making her play a piece in the manner it has been played for centuries. Her mother, now 92 and living with her, is one of those “square” musicians she disregarded in her youth.

“What amazes me that when she sits down and strikes a note on the koto, the sound is above anything I have achieved,” she said. “I think to myself, maybe if I practice for 80 years, I will be able to get a tone like that.”