“One hundred years after his budding legal career was sharply cut off, Takuji Yamashita is finally a lawyer.The state Supreme Court Thursday overturned a ruling it made in October 1902, denying Yamashita citizenship and the right to become a lawyer – simply because he was born in Japan.The Washington State Bar Association immediately gave Yamashita posthumous admittance to the bar, an honor the organization denied him at the beginning of the 20th century.At last he will be vindicated and we all feel very good about that, said Bainbridge Island resident Isami Nakao, age 88, a relative by marriage of Yamashita. Nakao’s brother Yone married Yamashita’s daughter Martha, and both are interred on Bainbridge Island.I am so excited for the family, said Bremerton historian Freddi Perry, who will escort members of the Yamashita family – some of whom have flown in from Japan – on a tour of Kitsap County this weekend. Yamashita came to the United States in 1893 to walk the path of honor, he told his parents. Racial prejudice in the United States would halt his journey. He mastered English quickly, graduated from Tacoma High School and later the U.W. School of Law in 1902 and passed the oral bar exam. But state law said only United States citizens could become lawyers.Under the federal law of the time, Japanese weren’t allowed citizenship.Yamashita, then 27 years old, didn’t let the ruling pass easily. He argued before the Washington Supreme Court that denying naturalization to Japanese citizens was improper for a nation founded on the fundamental principles of freedom and equality. Unbowed by his legal loss, Yamashita made the best of his life. He married Ito Nakagawa, the daughter of a wealthy grain trader, in 1902. They moved to Bremerton in 1914 and raised five children. For a time he managed the Togo Hotel, the People’s Cafe and the Rainier Hotel in Bremerton. A second U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1921 also went against Yamashita and Japanese citizens. In a twist of circular reasoning, that decision said that Japanese could not own land in the United States, citing the 1902 ruling that said they couldn’t be lawyers.After not being allowed to practice law, Yamashita and family members put down roots around Kitsap County and Bainbridge Island. The diligent Yamashita settled on a 20-acre leased farm in Silverdale at the end of quiet Mickleberry Road. The family raised strawberries and cultivated oysters. The Silverdale location became a mecca for Japanese in Seattle, who would come to the farm on weekends for large parties and festivities featuring roasted clams and sukiyaki.According to Nakao, Yamashita never brooded over his lost legal career.He never spoke of his problems, Nakao said. He was never one to feel sorry for himself or brag. He was a very positive person.InternmentThe family’s niche here would not last.After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the federal government placed 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Yamashita was forced into a camp in Tule Lake, Calif.About 70 Japanese families in Silverdale, Poulsbo and Kingston were sent out of the area, along with some 300 residents of Bainbridge Island.The only newspaper in the nation to come out against the internment was the Bainbridge Island Review, whose editor Walt Woodward criticized the action. The federal government later apologized for the action and paid nominal reparations to Japanese-Americans involved.But Yamashita was unable to make payments on his leased farms while interned, and the family lost their home, farm and business.After World War II, they lived with a their daughter Martha in Seattle for a time. She died in 1957. Yamashita, once a legal scholar, worked as a housekeeper before returning to Japan in 1957.On Thursday, about 20 members of the Yamashita family from Japan traveled to Olympia for the posthumous ceremony. Also in attendance was Yamashita’s great-grandson, now a resident of Manchester, Maine. Today, the group plans to tour the former Yamashita business locations in Bremerton, the family farm site in Silverdale and Hillcrest Cemetery on Bainbridge Island. Among the group will be Sam Nakao, a close friend of Takuji Yamashita. He was separated from Yamashita at one point during the internment, but eventually they were placed together in a camp in Idaho. Nakao said Thursday’s events and Saturday’s tour will make a mark on his life.Meetings relatives from Japan and Maine, he said, it will be an emotional thing and I think it will be so for a long, long while.When Yamashita returned to Japan in 1957, he was 86 years old and a changed man after events of World War II.That was a turning point, Nakao said. He had lost his place, he had to work as a domestic, Nakao said. He went back to Japan as a disillusioned man and two years later he died.But at long last, he is a lawyer in Washington, because justice finally came round to his side.John Olson is editor of the Patriot, the Review’s sister paper in Bremerton. “