He completed public school in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford University with a bachelors and a master's degree in economics, and earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, with a dissertation titled "Emigration in Japan and Japanese Immigration into the State of California".

[1][2] He was a frequent guest speaker at community organizations in San Francisco, during and after his graduate education.

[5] He researched, wrote, and published a classic immigration study, Japanese in the United States (1932).

Despite this gesture of loyalty, he and his wife, Kei, were uprooted and detained as part of the mass relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II following the signing of Executive Order 9066.

[13] In 1999, his unpublished journals from the 1940s were edited by Gordon H. Chang and published as Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and His Internment Writings, 1942-1945 by Stanford University Press.