Couple inseparable in life, death
San Diegans Joseph Yamada and Elizabeth Kikuchi first met in an internment camp.
SAN DIEGO — Joseph Yamada and Elizabeth Kikuchi were born two days apart, but they didn’t meet until they were 11, when both were sent with their families to a World War II internment camp in Poston, Ariz.
Then they became mostly inseparable. After the war, they went to San Diego High School together, then to UC Berkeley. They got married, raised a family, left their marks in landscape architecture and community service.
It almost seemed fitting when both died this month just days apart. He had battled dementia, and she succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Each had recently turned 90.
“He liked sports and diner food, and she was all about art, culture and refined food,” said son Garrett Yamada. “They raised us with a little bit of everything.”
Poston was an unlikely place for fruitful beginnings: row after row of tar-papered barracks in the middle of the desert, where summer temperatures passed 110.
Nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent, many of them U.S. citizens, were sent to camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Each internee was allowed to bring one suitcase. Everything else they sold, left with sympathetic friends or abandoned.
At Poston, they spent three years trying to make the best of it. They built their own school, swimming pool and auditorium, the site of dances where romance sometimes blossomed.
Garrett Yamada said his parents came home from the camp determined not to let being imprisoned in their own country sour them.
“They were open to anyone and everything,” he said.
At Berkeley, Joe studied landscape architecture; Liz studied English literature. When they returned to San Diego, she became the first Asian teacher at San Diego High and he worked for Harriett Wimmer, a pioneering landscape architect.
“Harriett was good with plants, and Joe could draw, and that made them a great combination,” said Pat Caughey, who considered Yamada a mentor and is now principal owner of the firm known as Wimmer Yamada and Caughey.
Yamada’s projects included designs for SeaWorld, UC San Diego, the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista and the parks along the Embarcadero in downtown San Diego. He favored curving walkways, water features and “the Yamada roll,” gently rounded knolls of lawn or plants.
The Yamadas were married in the early 1950s and eventually settled in La Jolla. Liz Yamada quit teaching to raise the couple’s three children, and when they were grown, she worked as an administrator in her husband’s firm and eventually became a partner.
She also wrote poetry and was active as a director on a variety of local boards. One project, in the early 1990s, was particularly meaningful to her.
While she was at Poston, she had corresponded with Clara Breed, a San Diego librarian who befriended many of the youngsters and sent them books, clothing and other supplies. Nearing the end of her life, Breed contacted Liz Yamada and said she didn’t know what to do with all the letters she’d saved from the internees.
“I couldn’t get there fast enough,” Yamada said.
The letters told of life in the camp. They spoke of resilience and hope amid the injustice and deprivations of being imprisoned.
Yamada donated the letters to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, hoping to preserve an episode in American history she believed should never be forgotten, “so what happened to us doesn’t happen to anybody else ever again,” she said.
Yamada died on May 20, nine days after her husband passed away.
They are survived by their children Garrett Yamada, Kent Yamada and Joan Batcheller, and their families.