Landing on a Beach of Prejudice : Marines admit errors in the outrageous case of Bruce Yamashita

Bruce Yamashita has spent almost five years facing down the Marine Corps over his unjust dismissal from officer candidate school in 1989. The Marines have admitted that racism played a role in his dismissal and recently appointed him a captain in the reserve corps. That surely was the right thing to do in this case, which has significant implications.

During a long fight Yamashita showed that there was a pervasive and consistent pattern of discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities in OCS. That has forced the Marines to change OCS policies and procedures. The OCS training manual, for example, was revised last February to make clear that the corps forbids statements, gestures and any actions that could be interpreted as racial, gender or ethnic prejudice or bias.

Yamashita, a third-generation American of Japanese ancestry, was subject to just such abuses during his OCS training in Quantico, Va. On his first day of class, a staff sergeant told him, “We don’t want your kind around here. Go back to your country.” Another instructor asked him why he had not joined the Japanese army. Yamashita was addressed regularly by the trade names of Japanese cars. Another drill sergeant reminded him that the United States in World War II had “whipped your Japanese ass.”(Yamashita’s grandparents settled in Hawaii 100 years ago. His uncle was in the highly decorated, all-Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and received a Purple Heart in World War II.)

Two days before his graduation from OCS, Yamashita, now 37 and an attorney in Washington, was “disenrolled” for what was described as “leadership failure.”

The Marines initially explained away the racial remarks as an appropriate test of Yamashita’s mental toughness. Later the corps apologized and offered to let him take the course over. Yamashita refused, maintaining that an officer’s commission was his due and that negative references to his leadership should be expunged from his record.

Yamashita held out for what was right and just. Discrimination clearly is not. For acknowledging that, the Marines should be better off.