You’ll see the All-Star Graduates of 2007 in Sunday’s paper – great kids, great stories.
Had there been such a thing in 1896, Takuji Yamashita would have made the list. Given what he accomplished and given the discrimination he endured, the award could even be named for him.
Yamashita lived in Tacoma for only a short time. But it was his first hometown in America and it gave him a start toward a fascinating life that ended in disappointment but not defeat. It was here that he began the first of two legal challenges to official discrimination against Asian immigrants – the first in the state Supreme Court, the second in the U.S. Supreme Court.
He lost both times. But both times he forced native-born and European immigrants to confront what we now see as racist laws.
I was reminded of Yamashita a year ago when I asked Tacoma teacher and historian Ron Magden for help compiling a list of prominent graduates of Stadium High School for the school’s centennial. Magden suggested Yamashita, among others, even though he’d graduated from Stadium’s predecessor eight years before the castle opened.
We didn’t include Yamashita then, but his story is worth retelling.
It starts with the relationship between two men, First Baptist Church lay leader John Arnell and a Japanese immigrant to Tacoma named Kyuhachi Nishii. Arnell encouraged Christian missionaries in Japan to send their brightest students to America and housed them in a Baptist mission across Sixth Avenue from Wright Park (near where the Hob Nob Restaurant now stands).
Once here, Nishii became their sponsor, employing them in his Pacific Avenue restaurant and his laundry while they attended school. Among the brightest was Yamashita, who completed a four-year Western classical civilization curriculum at Tacoma High School in just two years with nearly perfect grades. Yamashita then enrolled in one of the first classes at the University of Washington School of Law.
Four days before earning his law degree in 1902, Yamashita was back in Tacoma asking a judge to approve his naturalization papers. Armed with those documents, Yamashita traveled with his classmates to Olympia where he passed his oral bar exam.
But Yamashita alone was not given his license. That’s because state law required him to be a citizen but federal law offered such status only to whites and, after the Civil War, to those of African descent. It specifically excluded Chinese immigrants but was silent on those from Japan.
Yamashita sued and argued his case before the state Supreme Court against state Attorney General W.B. Stratton.
“Imagine this fresh, green immigrant law graduate up against the highest legal authority of the state,” said Steve Goldsmith, an editor of the Puget Sound Business Journal who is researching a book on Yamashita and who, along with Magden, is credited with discovering his story.
In “A Civil Action,” an article in the UW alumni magazine, Goldsmith quotes from Yamashita’s argument before the court: “Your applicant … knows of no tribunal to which an argument based upon the Declaration of Independence and the spirit of American institutions could be more appropriately addressed than to the Supreme Court of a free American state.”
On Oct. 22, 1902, the court ruled unanimously that Yamashita could not become a citizen because of his race and therefore could not practice law.
Yamashita went on to run successful restaurants and hotels in Seattle and Bremerton. But he was not allowed to be the legal owner of these businesses because the Washington Constitution prevented ownership by aliens who were not eligible for citizenship. Yamashita’s lawsuit against the ban reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1922. Again he lost.
The final indignity came when Yamashita and his family were forced to leave their farm and oyster beds near Silverdale and join other West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans in internment camps. They lost everything they owned and after being released he worked as a housekeeper in Seattle.
In 1957, Yamashita returned to Japan, where he died two years later.
Goldsmith, then working for the UW, discovered Yamashita while doing research for the law school’s centennial. He was among those who pushed to have Yamashita admitted to the state bar posthumously, something that was done in a ceremony in U.S. District Judge Jack Tanner’s Tacoma courtroom the day after the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Sixteen of Yamashita’s relatives from Japan and the United States attended.
Magden makes reference to Yamashita in “Furusato,” his history of the Tacoma Japanese community. But Magden didn’t fully appreciate Yamashita’s place in history until later and has helped research the story here and in Japan.
“Most Japanese wouldn’t test the system. But he did – so early that he was forgotten,” said Magden.
It’s a fate that Magden and Goldsmith are intent on reversing.
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