O'ahu man's project takes on Marines

Advertiser Staff

Some 10 years in the making, a documentary chronicling Bruce Yamashita's historic legal battle with the U.S. Marine Corps is nearly complete.

If all goes well, "A Most Unlikely Hero" will be ready for broadcast on PBS sometime this fall. What is needed is another $25,000 for closed captioning and other technical requirements.

While at Officer Candidate School in 1989, Yamashita, originally from O'ahu, was the target of repeated racial taunts. Two days before graduation, he and three other minority candidates were dropped from the program. Among the reasons given for his disenrollment, the Marines cited Yamashita's low scores in a subjective leadership evaluation.

Yamashita appealed on the grounds that he had been singled out because of his race. In 1992, his legal team won the right to review OCS records and was able to find a pattern of discrimination against minority candidates.

The case was settled in 1993, and Yamashita received a commission as a second lieutenant a year later.

"The case got a lot of support in the community and from politicians, and it resulted in some landmark changes at the Marine Corps level," said Steve Okino of Honolulu, who is spearheading the project. Okino said valuable lessons "came out of that whole process."

Okino said the documentary is intended to remind people of those lessons. He said the issues raised by Yamashita's case are particularly relevant after the events of 9/11 led to discussions of diminishing civil liberties.

The project is sponsored by the Matsunaga Charitable Foundation, with financial and in-kind support from the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Honolulu Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, the Harburg Foundation and others.

A Web site — www.unlikelyhero.com — will be up later this week with information about the project and a form for making donations.