Yuriko Moriuchi, 97, a teacher of Japanese flower arranging

When she was growing up in Los Angeles in the 1930s, Yuriko Uyehara learned to drive the family car so that she could take her father, Naotaka, to a neighborhood where Japanese American fishing families lived.

There, he collected shoes to take back to his cobbler's shop for repairs.

By 1938, she had earned an associate's degree in accounting at Los Angeles City College.

That normal life was lost when, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, she, her family, and other West Coast residents of Japanese heritage were imprisoned at the Rohwer Relocation Center near McGehee, Ark.

Among her losses, Yuriko Uyehara could not practice the Japanese art of flower arranging, which she had happened upon in college.

But by the time she had settled into her married life in Burlington County, daughter Agnes Miyo Moriuchi said, she had begun to learn and share the art that would shape her life.

"With a few branches and a handful of flowers," her daughter said, "hers was a living art of line and space, restraint, precision, texture, color, and years of study and practice."

Yuriko Uyehara Moriuchi, 97, of Medford, president in the mid-1980s of the Philadelphia chapter of Ikebana International, the flower-arranging society, died Monday, Aug. 3, at Samaritan Healthcare & Hospice in Mount Holly following a stroke.

She was a former president of the Moorestown Garden Club.

Since 1986, Mrs. Moriuchi had lived at Medford Leas, the retirement community she and her husband, Takashi, had helped found.

The couple met through the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia after they had been released from separate interment camps.

In an account she gave to the Medford Leas magazine, when she met Takashi Moriuchi, "she was not very impressed."

"He was a farmer, and that was the last type of person she would like to be serious with. She was a city girl with no family background in farming.

"As she grew to know him better, she liked his honesty and mischievous streak, and his drive."

Drive, indeed.

After they married in 1946, he bought his first 100-acre vegetable farm in Mount Laurel with a bank loan that year. By 1975 his farming had expanded to 1,000 acres with annual sales of $2 million - the equivalent of $8.8 million in 2015 dollars.

Born in Oakland, Calif., Mrs. Moriuchi graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles in 1936 and was a bookkeeper for a fishing and canning firm in Long Beach, Calif., before the war.

After marrying, she was the office manager for the family farm, Tak Moriuchi Inc. of Moorestown.

But her life interest, her daughter said, was the art of flower arranging.

She studied it in Japan on four visits, translated for Japanese masters of the art who visited Philadelphia, and continued to teach it until less than a week before her death.

Marie Cartwright of Mount Laurel was a student for 10 years, and among the four at her last class at Medford Leas.

A gardener, Cartwright said working at the art "keeps you focused and everything else goes out of your mind. . . . I always felt very privileged and proud to be one of her students."

Besides her daughter, Mrs. Moriuchi is survived by son Fred; daughters Carol Kiyo Moriuchi and Nancy Chiyo Moriuchi; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2010.

A Quaker memorial service has been set for 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13, at Medford Leas, off Route 70 in Medford.

Donations may be sent to Moorestown Friends Meeting, 118 E. Main St., Moorestown, N.J. 08057 or www.moorestownfriendsmeeting.org.

Condolences may be offered to the family at the meeting's address.

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