Kumiko “Kate” Yoshihara, who died in Westminster on Saturday at age 91, emerged from a Japanese-American internment camp to help start a Boulder County floral business that supplied flowers for President Bush’s 2005 inaugural festivities.
Yoshihara was born in Los Angeles on Oct. 17, 1914, to Japanese immigrants Matsu Gyotoku and Kyukichi Ishii. She was educated in the U.S. and in Japan, where she lived with her grandparents until the 1930s.
She married Yasutaro Yoshihara on Valentine’s Day, 1934, in Los Angeles. In 1942, she and her husband lost their home and most of their belongings when the U.S. government forced hundreds of thousands of Japanese- Americans to live in relocation camps.
She rarely spoke of her days at Camp Amache/Grenada Relocation Center, the eastern Colorado facility where the Yoshiharas spent part of their internment years.
When World War II ended and Amache closed, Yoshihara distanced herself from her culture.
“After the internment camp, my grandma insisted no one speak Japanese at home – only English,” said granddaughter Lori Wheat, who now runs Lafayette Florist & Greenhouses with her husband.
“Her home was very American. The only thing you could tell that was Japanese was that she had a hotokesama. It’s like a little shrine, with photographs of her parents and my grandfather’s parents and other family pictures, a Buddha statue, flowers and incense.”
The Yoshiharas remained in Colorado, where then-Gov. Ralph L. Carr controversially encouraged Camp Amache’s 7,567 inmates to stay.
They moved to Lafayette and opened a fruit stand and flower shop in 1948.
The Yoshiharas’ business was on the main highway through Lafayette, then a modest farm town. As big grocery stores drew away their fruit customers, the Yoshiharas concentrated on selling flowers, first in their shop and then in the garden center they expanded as more people moved to Boulder County.
For years, the Yoshiharas lived and raised their children in residential quarters behind the shop.
Well into her 80s, Kate Yoshihara walked to work each day. There, she would tie on a gardening apron heavy with hand tools and pull a big garbage can along as she snapped spent blossoms from the plants.
“She was twice as fast as any other worker,” Wheat said. “She was very serious when she was at work. She put her head down, and when she got going, no one could catch up to her.”
Yoshihara was enormously proud when her granddaughters, Wheat and Sandi Yoshihara-Sniff, were chosen to be among the 200 designers charged with 3,500 arrangements for the presidential inaugural festivities last year.
Survivors include sons Jim Yoshihara of Lafayette, Gene Yoshihara and Don Yoshihara, both of Broomfield; daughters Joyce Tani of Northglenn and Ann Murphy of Lafayette; and brothers Jim Ishii of Pasadena, Calif., Hank Ishii of Los Angeles and Tom Ishii of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Her husband preceded her in death.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
