Justice Prevails for Law Graduate, 99 Years Late

By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
New York Times, March 11, 2001

TACOMA, Wash., March 9 — Ninety-nine years after passing his bar exam with honors, only to be denied the right ever to practice law by the Washington State Supreme Court because he was not a member of "any branch of the white or whitish race," Takuji Yamashita has received some posthumous justice.

In a symbolic coda to what is now widely viewed as a sorry chapter of national history, the same court that denied Mr. Yamashita the right to be a lawyer held an extraordinary ceremony here last week in the city where he arrived from Japan in 1893.

And before his grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren from both sides of the Pacific, and scores of students and faculty members from the University of Washington School of Law, the court announced that it had effectively set aside the October 1902 court decision. Mr. Yamashita, the justices said, should be admitted as an honorary member of the bar.

That ceremony occurred a day after the earthquake that struck western Washington and was moved from the state capital, Olympia, because of quake damage there.

"In spite of the earthquake and three canceled flights, we are here," said Naoto Kobayashi, a descendant who came from Maine with his wife and three sons. "This is the spirit of my great-grandfather. He taught me to never give up."

Mr. Kobayashi, who teaches Japanese in a high school, and the other descendants of Mr. Yamashita bowed in thanks as the state's chief justice, Gerry Alexander, signed the resolution at the federal courthouse here.

As a young emigrant from Japan, Mr. Yamashita was among just 10 members of the class of 1902 at the University of Washington law school. And at 27, he argued vigorously before the State Supreme Court that his exclusion from the bar was unworthy of a nation "founded on the fundamental principles of freedom and equality."

Exclusions based on race, he said in his 28-page brief, were a clear affront to "the most enlightened and liberty-loving nation of them all."

But the state attorney general at the time, W. D. Stratton, mocked Mr. Yamashita's "worn-out, star-spangled banner orations" before the court. And it was Mr. Stratton who argued that "in no
classification of the human race is a native of Japan treated as belonging to any branch of the white or whitish race."

The judges, while acknowledging in their decision that Mr. Yamashita was "intellectually and morally" qualified to practice law, said that he could not become a lawyer because, as a Japanese immigrant, he was ineligible to become an American citizen and only citizens could be lawyers. And so he lost his case.

Justice Alexander said the court was not acting to "indict our forebears" because the 1902 decision was in accord with legal requirements at the time. A 1790 federal law permitted only "free white citizens" to become naturalized Americans; Japanese immigrants were not accorded the same right until 1952.

So Mr. Yamashita, instead, became a successful strawberry farmer and oyster cultivator, only to lose everything when he and his family were among the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

He later worked as a housekeeper in Seattle and died in obscurity in 1959, at 84, at the home of his grandchildren in Japan. Still hanging proudly on the wall was Mr. Yamashita's law degree.

His story was well known in the extended Yamashita family, said Mr. Kobayashi, the Japanese teacher, from Manchester, Me., who named one of his sons after the boy's great-great-grandfather. But now those family members are hoping that Mr. Yamashita might become far more widely known as a civil rights pioneer.

"His whole spirit, his whole fight, was simply to show that everybody should be equal under the law," Mr. Kobayashi, 46, said. He and his sister, Tazuko Kobayashi, 44, a professor of sociology at Japan Women's University in Tokyo, helped provide the historical documentation leading to Mr. Yamashita's belated recognition.

Officials at the university's law school, which graduated its first class in 1901, also unearthed information about Mr. Yamashita while planning for centennial celebrations, and concluded that recognizing and correcting the injustice would be a fitting way to note the anniversary. The law school's dean, Roland Hjorth, called Mr. Yamashita "one of our most courageous graduates."

The school, along with the State Bar Association and the Asian Bar Association of Washington, petitioned the State Supreme Court to admit Mr. Yamashita.

Technically, the court did not overrule the earlier decision, Mr. Alexander said, but it acted now because the statutes had been "fortunately repealed or declared unconstitutional."

Though he never got to practice law, Mr. Yamashita did wind up in the courts again.

In 1921, the state passed the Alien Land Law, which prevented Asians from owning or even leasing land. The action had been promoted by a group of Seattle businessmen calling itself the Anti-Japanese League, whose president explained to a newspaper at the time: "They constantly demonstrate their ability to best the white man at his own game in farming, fishing and business. They will work harder, deprive themselves of every comfort and luxury, make beasts of burden of their women, and stick together, making a combination that America cannot defeat."

Deeply offended, Mr. Yamashita challenged the law by creating the Japanese Real Estate Holding Company and trying to buy land. This time his case, argued by lawyers he had to hire, went to the United States Supreme Court. He lost again, and to add insult to that injury, the Supreme Court specifically cited the very 1902 decision that blocked Mr. Yamashita from becoming a lawyer.

Though Mr. Yamashita's admission to the bar is entirely symbolic, some at the ceremony said he had nonetheless won a major victory.

"This gives me great hope," said Ron Mamiya, a municipal judge in Seattle who is Japanese-American and who helped petition for the court's action. "This can be a lesson, that we can know America is a place where we can correct our mistakes, and give something back."