Yosie Kamiya was born October 17, 1940, to Kaei and Waseko Ngai Kamiya in Long Beach, California. Her father, Kaei Kamiya, was born in Hawaii; her mother was born in California. In 1942, the Kamiya family (Yosie Kamiya, her parents, her sister Yuriko, and her brother Eiichi) was forcibly removed from their home in California to the Rohwer Relocation Center in Rohwer, Arkansas under the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Her younger sister, Eiko Kamiya, was born at Rohwer in 1943.

In 1945, the family was released from Rohwer and moved to Boyle Heights, California, where they briefly lived before moving to Gardena, California in 1947. Yosie Kamiya graduated from Gardena High School in 1958, and was inducted into the Ephebian Society in her senior year. She graduated from Whittier College in 1962, and married Victor N. Yoshimura (who had been incarcerated at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona as a child) on July 14, 1963 in Los Angeles. She worked as director of the Gardena Recreation and Human Services Department, among other roles. Following Victor Yoshimura's death in 1993, Yosie Kamiya Yoshimura later remarried, to Harry Iida. Yosie Yoshimura Iida passed away June 11, 2018, in Gardena, California.