Kanazawa University
Bunji Sakita was born in Japan in 1930 in the Toyama prefecture. He received his bachelor's degree from Kanazawa University in 1953. He then worked with Sakata's group in Nagoya University, obtaining his master's degree in 1956. He was among a select group of Japanese students recruited by Robert Marshak to come for graduate studies to the University of Rochester. In Rochester, Sakita worked with Professor Charles Goebel and received his Ph.D in 1959. He went on to a postdoctoral position and a professorship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In his beginning years at Wisconsin, and during a year he spent at the Argonne National Laboratory, he developed the SU(6) symmetry of the nonrelativistic quark model generalizing Wigner's supermultiplet symmetry of combining spin and isospin.