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PF: What did you do right after you graduated from law school? Where did your career take you or your life take you then?

TT: Well, let's see. First of all, we had to study for and pass the bar exam. So we graduated in June, and then as soon as we got home, we went to a bar exam cram school here. And then we took the exam in October, and then December of 1950, I graduated 1950. In December of 1950 they announced the results of the law exam. I was one of fifteen out of forty-five applicants that passed. And so I was licensed to practice law in December of 1945.

My first job was being a law associate of attorney Masaji Marumoto, who was regarded as one of the top if not the top Nisei lawyers here in Hawaii. And I got several other offers, but I decided, I heard about it and I respected this attorney Marumoto and thought this was the kind of guy that I'd like to practice with and learn a lot.

PF: What kind of law did he practice?

TT: Well, you know, general practice. But he, of course had a large clientele of Issei businessmen. He was very well-schooled in Japanese, so he was bilingual verbally as well as literarily. But I just helped out by doing some of the more menial jobs like taking his divorce cases to court. You know, the kind of stuff that you can trust a young greenhorn just out of law school. I spent a couple of years with attorney Marumoto and I was called by and was invited to serve in the city and county attorney's office, which would give the you government law experience. So from 1953 to '56 or so, I spent at least three years at the city and county attorney's office. And in 1956 I left and went into private practice with Sueaki Okumura who was a more senior attorney than I, who had also left the city and county attorney's office three or four years earlier. And then in a few years, Masaji Marumoto was appointed to the Supreme Court to be a judge, and so his law practice was sort of inherited or passed on over to Okumura. So we had a very busy years of law practice. And it got so that the Marumoto law practice and the Okumura law practice merged, and so that became the beginning of what they called Okumura and Takushi law partnership. And for the next ten, twelve years or so, I practiced with that firm, you know, doing general law practice.

During that time, I had been appointed as contract counsel for the Honolulu Redevelopment Agency, and this was the agency charged with the slum clearance program here in Honolulu, and also did contract work for the Hawaii Redevelopment Agency, which from 1961 or so, to do the Tidal Wave Rehabilitation Project in Hilo following the tidal wave devastation. And this was all part of private practice, and I think from 1967 on, I went on my own. I became a single practitioner. And you might say, although I associated with other younger, several younger attorneys along the way, the rest of my legal career from 1970s up all the way through, I guess it's the year 2001 when I finally retired my law license. So that was fifty-one years. From 1950 to 2001 is, what, sixty-one years. And from 2001 I have not... of course, I can't practice law, but I have been active in all this time, from 1959 on, I developed a very active and successful arbitration practice where I'm called to be the arbitrator, in other words, a private judge to determine disputes between, mostly grievance disputes between the various unions and the various employers. And actually, that work, that career still exists until today. I still get called.

PF: How many cases do you do a year now?

TT: Well, at the height, I did forty or fifty a year. But now I'm down to... oh, I'm lucky to get seven or eight cases a year.

PF: That's a lot, considering you're retired.

TT: Yeah, I'm semi-retired.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.