SAN FRANCISCO — Grace Obata Amemiya was a pre-nursing student at UC Berkeley in 1942 when she, her family and 120,000 other Japanese Americans were forced from their schools and homes and sent to federal internment camps. The wartime relocations destroyed her childhood dream of a University of California diploma.
Amemiya, now 88, joyfully returned to UC on Thursday and was named a graduate six decades late.
The UC Board of Regents agreed Thursday to grant honorary degrees to all Japanese Americans who were students at the university during World War II and whose educations were interrupted by the forced relocations. The decision at the board's meeting in San Francisco marked the first time in 37 years that the regents have bestowed such degrees, making an exception to a moratorium intended to help avoid political pressures or the appearance of favoritism.
"I felt so honored. I've been floating way up there and my two feet have not come down yet," Amemiya told the regents in a speech that held her audience spellbound.
She said she and many Japanese American classmates regretted that they had never been able to return to the campus she still affectionately calls "Cal." "So it's been a part of our lives and expectations were not complete," Amemiya said.
For those broken dreams, the UC system apologized and authorized special honorary degrees with a Latin inscription translated as "to restore justice among the groves of the academy."
"Fear is a powerful thing. And when it is put to an evil purpose as it was in this case, we owe a sense of profound regret, profound sorrow, that our country was off track," regent Eddie Island said of the internments. "Today, we can rectify that in some very small way."
UC officials estimated that about 700 Japanese Americans were enrolled during the 1941-42 school year at what was then a four-campus university system; about 300 later returned to complete their degrees. The remaining 400 will also receive the honorary diplomas even though many finished their college educations elsewhere and a significant number have died. Only about a dozen of the former students have been located so far and a search is underway for the others, or for surviving relatives.
"We are going to do our darndest to find every single one of them," said William Kidder, a UC Riverside administrator who has been active in the effort to award the degrees. He said he expected the regents' action to elicit information about the whereabouts and fate of many former students. (E-mails with tips can be sent to HonoraryDegree@ucop.edu)
