Like other California State University and California Community College campuses, San Jose State University is searching for their former Japanese American students who were forced to leave the University due to their imprisonment in American concentration camps during World War II so they (or surviving family members) can be awarded an honorary degree from the University.

You can read more about their search (they need your help!) at: Nisei Diploma Project.

Related Stories:
California State University System To Grant Honorary Degrees To Japanese American Internees
SDSU: A Matter Of Restitution
SDSU: A Wonderful Gesture
California State University Searches For Former Japanese American Students

The following is a press release from the California State University system.

LONG BEACH, CA — Do you know of a Japanese American student who was removed from a California State University campus in 1941-42 and incarcerated in a camp?

Six California State University campuses are searching for 250 Japanese American students who were forcibly removed from CSU campuses during World War II and relocated to prison camps, interrupting their academic careers.

The CSU campuses plan to award these Nisei students Special Honorary Bachelor of Humane Letters degrees as part of the CSU’s Nisei Honorary Degree Project. The CSU project is a result of Assembly Member Warren Furutani’s bill, Assembly Bill 37, which called upon the CSU, University of California and the community colleges to award the degrees.

“By awarding these degrees, the California State University hopes to help heal the wounds of injustice suffered by these Japanese Americans, to honor their academic intentions and to welcome them back to the CSU as alumni,” said CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed.

A new CSU website, http://www.calstate.edu/nisei has been launched to help in the search and provide application forms for the Nisei and/or their families. The CSU also has established a dedicated e-mail address, nisei@calstate.edu and a dedicated phone number, (562) 951-4723 for people who need additional information.

The six CSU campuses where students attended and that will grant the honorary degrees are: Fresno, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, San Luis Obispo and Pomona (which was a branch of San Luis Obispo during those years). CSU Dominguez Hills is assisting is the search for students, and will host a ceremony at its campus if there are Los Angeles-area Nisei who cannot travel to their former campuses.

In addition, the CSU Chancellor’s Office has formed an Honorary Nisei Committee of prominent Californians who support the CSU’s efforts. They are:

• Assembly Member Warren Furutani, Author of AB 37
• James Hirabayashi, Founding curator of the Japanese American National Museum
• Congressman Mike Honda
• Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Author of Farewell to Manzanar
• Helen Kawagoe, Board of Governors, Japanese American National Museum and Carson City Clerk
• Dale Minami, Attorney who chaired the federal Civil Liberties Public Education Program
• Norm Mineta, Former Congressman and U.S. Secretary of Transportation
• Paul Osaki, Executive Director, Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California
• Joan Otomo-Corgel, CSU Trustee Emeritus and Fresno State alumna whose father is a Fresno honoree
• Margaret Iwanaga Penrose, President and Chief Executive Officer, Union of Pan Asian Communities
• Kevin Starr, California State Librarian Emeritus and Administrator of the CA Civil Liberties Public Education Program
• Bob H. Suzuki, Former President of Cal Poly Pomona
• George Takei, Actor and Former Chairman of the Japanese American National Museum
• Yoshihiro Uchida, Former Olympic and judo coach at SJSU
• Jan Yanehiro, San Francisco Bay Area broadcast newscaster and host of community-interest programs
• Akemi Kikumura Yano, Executive Director of the Japanese American National Museum

The new Nisei website also has dates of the campuses’ commencement ceremonies, and links to the people at each of the campuses who are coordinating the efforts there.

The campuses are working with their local Japanese American community organizations to help locate their former students using lists that they have compiled from old registrar’s records, yearbooks, alumni and library records, and other sources. The Chancellor’s Office is also working closely with the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC) which has a grant to help the state’s higher educational institutions in locating the former students.

As the former students are located and celebrated at the campus commencement ceremonies, the CSU will post many of their stories on the http://www.calstate.edu/nisei web site.

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The following story originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of the San Diego State University Alumni E-Newsletter. It is reprinted here with permission. Original story: A Wonderful Gesture.

by Tobin Vaughn, Editor

SDSU: Former Student to Receive Honorary Degree

Carl Yoshimine (highlighted) shown in the 1942 Del Sudoeste Yearbook at San Diego State College, now San Diego State University.

“Emotionally, it was awkward,” he remembers.

The day before, he had been as shocked as everyone by news that the Japanese navy had attacked Pearl Harbor. This was the first day of classes since the attack and much of the country was still coming to grips with the stunning developments that would plunge America into World War II. When he arrived on campus from his family’s home in Ocean Beach, the first semester freshman encountered a subdued student body.

“Everybody was in small groups. All the students were kind of shocked and they were talking with each other,” Yoshimine recalls. “And I guess because of my ancestry – I’m of Japanese ancestry – I just felt kind of awkward. I wasn’t responsible for any of it and I didn’t feel guilty, but it was just an awkward day for me.”

As Yoshimine remembers it, none of his classmates were hostile or accusatory. He has no memory of a negative incident at San Diego State.

“Not on campus,” he insists. “There were other incidents after that when we were in public places. There were some remarks that were not very pleasant, but never on campus.”

As months passed, Yoshimine fell back into the routine of studying business and economics; classes the teenager thought would provide the best background for a solid career. But he came to discover a new favorite subject.

“I enjoyed history,” he recalls. “At the time there was Dr. (A.P.) Nasatir and I thought he was someone with a very good grasp of the South American culture and I really enjoyed his classes.”

Before Yoshimine could change educational directions, however, a government decree would alter the course of his life. Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, authorized the U.S. military to relocate Japanese Americans, including Yoshimine and his family, from along the Pacific coast to inland internment camps.

“And So We Got On The Train”

Word came suddenly in April, 1942. “We received that order and so we had to move. We had to leave our homes,” the San Diego native and Point Loma High School graduate remembers. He and his family were told to report to the downtown train station.

In April 1942, Japanese Americans were among those evacuated by train from the coast to inland relocation centers.

“According to the order, you were only to take what you could carry, so we each packed a suitcase and then we packed a duffel bag because it was too difficult to carry two suitcases. It was just the basic things that we would need—mostly clothing and necessities. We heard that we may go to some area that, weather-wise, was not like San Diego. It seems strange now because nowadays everyone is wearing jeans and Levis and things like that, but in those days I hadn’t even seen what Levis were like, but we went and bought Levis to be equipped for a harsher climate.

“We couldn’t take furniture. It was so limited we just left everything. We didn’t have that much time. We would just take out our furniture in front of our house and have people buy it or just give it away. My older brother, Masao, turned in our personal car to the Dodge dealer, which was about two or three blocks from the Santa Fe Station in San Diego and then he walked back to the station. And so we got on the train.”

“We Had To Do What We Had To Do”

Just like that. Was there any thought of organizing a protest or at least laying plans to someday return and claim their property?

“I think things in that era were such that when certain laws were put in place you just were obedient and did it,” Yoshimine explains. “I don’t think the frame of mind of people was thinking ahead. They just were so intense at the time. I didn’t feel that anyone said, ‘We’ll come back’ or anything like that. It didn’t enter my mind. We had to do what we had to do. It wasn’t fatalistic. It’s just the way it was then and what else could you do?”

Yoshimine, his brother and parents ended up in a camp in the desert called Poston III, one of a trio of camps at the Poston Relocation Center near Parker, Arizona. There, his father, who had driven a produce route in San Diego, was director of food and eventually became camp director of Poston III. Yoshimine and his brother, both with some college education, became teachers of the camp’s younger students.

After about a year in the camp and before the war was over, Yoshimine relocated to Wilmore, Kentucky where his San Diego State credits transferred to Asbury College. It was what many of his friends in the camps were doing as they could not return to the coast.

On the train trip from Cincinnati down through Kentucky, The young man from California had his first experience with the American South.

“The train was full and I was naïve, so I went to another car,” Yoshimine recounts. “They told me I had to move out of that car because it was a segregated car and I had gone into the wrong section. It was a Jim Crow car and so I learned about that in an uncomfortable way.”

Moving On

Despite the discriminatory challenges they encountered, the Yoshimine’s went on with their lives. Brother Masao volunteered for the counterintelligence corps and served with the U.S. Army in Japan. Yoshimine graduated with a degree in history. Wanting to share his Christian faith, he then went on to Asbury Theological Seminary for his master’s degree in religious education. He later attended divinity school in Berkeley and got another degree.

Yoshimine married, had three sons, and became a pastor in the Pacific Coast Free Methodist Conference. For 43 years he preached on Sundays to congregations throughout his native California before retiring in 1994. He and his wife, Miko, now live in Anaheim.

Carl Yoshimine
Photo courtesy Carl Yoshimine

After an extensive search to locate them, Yoshimine is one of three diploma-eligible students to contact SDSU along with the family members of some of the others. Their input is sought to plan a May ceremony on campus for awarding the degrees.

“I thought it was just a wonderful gesture and I really appreciated that move,” Yoshimine says of the honorary degree. He’s looking forward to returning to the campus he hasn’t seen since the day he left in 1942.

“I’m sorry I haven’t (visited),” he says. “I follow the basketball and the football teams in the newspaper and I still know the fight song.”

He begins to sing the words familiar to Aztecs everywhere:

“‘Fight on, and on, ye Aztec men. Sons of Montezuma we will win again.’ See? I know the song!” he proudly proves.

Molding Character

When he finally returns to campus in May, Yoshimine says he will gladly accept his honorary degree from SDSU.

“I feel it’s an important event because it’s not only honoring a particular group of people, but it’s honoring what education in the United States stands for and the integrity of what an education should be and the fulfillment of a person as an individual seeking to fulfill their dreams,” he says.

Later this month, Yoshimine will celebrate his 86th birthday. Looking back, does he feel cheated by having his education interrupted and his life and his family’s lives turned upside down? On the contrary.

“To me, every circumstance molds a person’s character,” he explains. “Going to the relocation center, for me, helped me find a stronger faith, which has put me in a more positive outlook rather than a discouraging or negative approach.

“I think carrying excess baggage or bitterness narrows your perspective of life. It doesn’t expand you as a person. To carry something with bitterness and hurt scars you as an individual for not being able to overcome it. And to live in that state is something that is unhealthy as far as I’m concerned.”

Spoken like the Aztec Carl Yoshimine once was and soon again will be.

Related Story:
SDSU: A Matter Of Restitution

California State University campuses throughout California will award honorary degrees to their former Japanese American students who were forced to leave their respective campuses during World War II, per California Assembly Bill 37, which was signed into law in October 2009. If you, or someone you know might be eligible, click on: California State University System To Grant Honorary Degrees To Japanese American Internees.

Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga
Photo: Discover Nikkei

After camp, she became a community and political activist, but is best-known for poring over tons of documents in the National Archives, discovering evidence that the United States Government perjured itself before the United States Supreme Court in the 1944 cases Korematsu v. United States, Hirabayashi v. United States, and Yasui v. United States which challenged the constitutionality of the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Herzig-Yoshinaga’s research uncovered evidence that the government had presented falsified evidence to the Court, destroyed evidence, and had withheld other vital information. This evidence provided the legal basis Japanese Americans needed to seek redress and reparations for their wartime imprisonment in American concentration camps.

Recently, she wrote a paper on the use of euphemistic language to describe these camps. Indeed, the US Government officially called them “relocation centers” during World War II. To this day, the debate rages on regarding what they should be called.

Now that the Manzanar National Historic Site has been established and is progressing in its work to educate the public about the experiences of those imprisoned there, efforts are also underway to protect, preserve and provide interpretive and educational resources for other Japanese American confinement sites such as the Minidoka National Historic Site, Tule Lake, Topaz, Amache, Heart Mountain, and more.

The National Park Service, which administers the Manzanar National Historic Site, Minidoka, Tule Lake and other sites, uses “relocation center” to refer to these camps. As such, a movement has begun to change that, and Herzig-Yoshinaga’s paper, “…is a personal story of how [her] consciousness about the uses and abuses of euphemistic terminology has evolved through the hard work and courage of many individuals from myriad backgrounds, both without and within the community of Nikkei (persons of Japanese ancestry). I am certainly not alone, nor among the first, to be concerned about the power of words to lie or clarify, and the need to identify and replace inaccurate and misleading euphemisms that were used by government officials at all levels and perpetuated by many Nikkei as well.”

To read (download) her insightful and well-researched paper, click on: Words Can Lie Or Clarify: Terminology Of The World War II Incarceration Of Japanese Americans by Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga (requires Adobe Reader software to view/print).

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and are not necessaily those of the Manzanar Committee.

The following is press release from the Japanese American Historical Society of Southern California.

Two recurring themes of “Community” and “History” typify authors’ works at the Japanese American Historical Society of Southern California’s Saturday, March 6, JAHSSC Authors/Artists Faire at the Katy Geissert Civic Center Library, 3301 Torrance Bl., Torrance, California, 90503, from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

World War II and the incarceration, etched forever in art, history and literature as the defining moment of the lives of Issei and Nisei, are shown through various works of the historians, writers and artists. Such works as Diana Meyers Bahr’s oral history of the late Sue Kunitomi Embrey, The Unquiet Nisei, available for the first time in paperback at the Faire; Emeritus Professor of History, Don Hata’s Japanese Americans and World War II: Mass Removal, Imprisonment and Redress; Professor Lane Hirabayashi’s’ collection of War Relocation Authority photographs in his book, Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens; Sharon Yamato’s DVD on the life of the late Michi Nishiura Weglyn, and the book, Moving Walls: Preserving the Barracks of America’s Concentration Camps; Eiko Irene Masuyama’s archive researched The Buddhist Church Experience in the Camps, 1942-1945; first-time fiction writer Stanley Kanzaki’s The Issei Prisoners of the San Pedro Internment Center; and artist Mary Higuchi’s award-winning Manzanar paintings reproduced on purchasable cards. Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga will also do a short presentation on a topical issue in her essay, Words Can Lie or Clarify: Terminology of the World War II Incarceration of Japanese Americans.

“Community” is also shared in a variety of ways. Through writings, such as Professor Hirabayashi’s Common Ground: the Japanese American National Museum and the Culture of Collaborations, and the Arcadia Publishing community series, Japanese Americans of the South Bay by Dale Ann Sato, and Sawtelle: West Los Angeles’ Japantown by Jack Fujimoto.

Professor Valerie Matsumoto’s works traces our history from past to present in Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982, and also the stories of Nisei girls in prewar Southern California and Issei and Nisei artists in selected chapters within larger texts.

CSUN Asian American Studies lecturer, Glen Omatsu, traces what has become the Sansei legacy in Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment, telling the story of the communities of activists for social justice and civil rights from the late 1960s that also link to current day issues. Further, Omatsu’s Teaching About Asian Pacific Americans: Effective Activities, Strategies and Assignments for Classrooms and Communities is a resource not only for college instructors but also high school social studies teachers and community organizations who seek resources for adult workshops and seminars in sharing heritage. He points out LAUSD high school teacher, Tony Osumi’s lesson, Feast of Resistance, which uses food to share experiences.

Sharing family stories reveals community ties through history, the values, and the lessons. Retired college professor, Midori Kamei, tells her story in Granddaughter of a Samurai, and Kaori Tanegashima, retired professor of Asian American Studies and Japanese language in Daughter of a Gun. Kathy Kobayashi, historical consultant, worked on Shades of L.A.: Pictures from Ethnic Family Albums, compiled in the 1990s, which includes many Issei and Nisei family photos (you may see friends and families!). Mystery writer, Naomi Hirahara, uses pieces of her family history in her Edgar award winning Mas Arai series, debuting her first hardcover and fourth novel, Blood Hina, at the Faire.

As the young generations today have their communities of sports leagues, the Nisei had judo among other Japanese martial arts. Ansho Mas Uchima’s Fighting Spirit gives the history of judo in Southern California from 1930 to 1941.

Wakako Yamauchi, playwright and short story writer, writes stories of what she knows from her life experiences in such works as And the Soul Shall Dance,12-1-A, and Songs My Mother Taught Me. She will read a short story from Rosebud, her new book to be published later this year.

Sansei writer, traci kato kiriyama, calls out to those who might want to join her in the exploration of art, death, war, place, and being, through her first book of poetry, signaling.

Lastly, FOOD. What is “community” without food? The majority of the Senshin Buddhist Temple Otoki cookbook committee are also JAHSSC members, including Chris Aihara, chairperson, and Qris Yamashita, design and layout. Iku Kiriyama, Otoki committee member, and chair of the March 6 Faire, submitted “Almond Chicken,” available only in Otoki, which she demonstrated on Torrance CitiCable’s Community Cooking around 1993. This recipe was one of the most requested and became a Community Cooking Classic and aired on other cable channels in the Southland. For several years, strangers and friends would come up and say that they had “just” seen “her” cooking show. She also shared several New Year “osechi ryori” recipes in Otoki—all “easy and good,” that she has used for over 30 years. Otoki is a virtual treasure trove of Issei, Nisei, and Sansei family recipes shared by temple families and friends. So, come to the Faire and take advantage of a new special price.

Artists Mary Nomura, fashion designer; quilters Mary Emi and Ruby Tabata; and Yasuko Sakamoto, Japanese artwork designs, were featured in the February 17 Rafu Shimpo article.

Carolyn Sanwo and Heritage Source will handle most of the sales and accepts MasterCard or VISA. Individual authors and artists will accept cash or checks only.

For questions regarding this free admission event, contact Iku Kiriyama at (310) 326-0608.

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UPDATED February 26, 2010: Preliminary details announced. Printable flyer available for download.

Participants pay their respects to those who passed away at Manzanar during World War II at the traditional Interfaith service during the 40th Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage on April 25, 2009.
Photo: Gann Matsuda

Each year, hundreds of students, teachers, community members, clergy and former internees attend the Pilgrimage. Planning is underway for the afternoon event as well as for the Manzanar At Dusk program, scheduled for 5:00 PM that same evening.

Further details about the Pilgrimage and the Manzanar At Dusk program, including information on bus transportation from the Los Angeles area, will be announced at a later date.

Pilgrimage participants are advised to bring their own lunch, drinks and snacks as there are no facilities to purchase food at the Manzanar National Historic Site (restaurants and fast food outlets are located in Lone Pine and Independence, which are nearby). Water will be provided at the site.

To download a printable flyer,
click on this image (6.9 MB).

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The printable flyer at right requires Adobe Reader software.

The following is a press release from the UCLA Newsroom. Original story: UCLA Seeks Japanese American Students Whose Education Was Interrupted during World War II.

By Claudia Luther, UCLA Newsroom
February 17, 2010

To download a printable flyer detailing UCLA’s honorary degree program, click on the image above.

Some of the former students, most now in their 80s and 90s, are expected to attend the ceremony, and family members will receive diplomas on behalf of others who are unable to attend. Still others will receive diplomas by mail. Many former students are deceased.

Approximately 700 University of California students were affected by the World War II directive, more than 200 of whom attended UCLA. The UC Board of Regents voted last July to suspend its moratorium on honorary degrees in order to recognize the students forced from UC classrooms.

“It’s never too late to join with others throughout the nation in recognizing that the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II was wrong,” said Don Nakanishi, who is chairman of UCLA’s honorary degree task force, Professor Emeritus and Director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. “More than 700 UC students had to terminate their studies at UCLA and other campuses, and most never received degrees from these institutions.”

Nakanishi added that by honoring these former students, “We acknowledge the many diverse contributions they made to campus life in student government, athletics and academics and formally welcome them back to our academic communities.”

The keynote speaker at UCLA’s honorary degree event will be state Assemblyman Warren Furutani (D-South Los Angeles County), who carried legislation in the Assembly calling on California’s higher education institutions to extend honorary degrees to individuals whose college education was disrupted. The ceremony at UCLA, which is the fourth of the UC campuses to bestow these honorary degrees, will take place on the same day as the campus’s annual Alumni Day.

UCLA is encouraging family members and others to help identify UCLA students who were unable to graduate because of internment and is asking that information be sent to Patricia Lippert, Associate Director of Special Events and Protocol at UCLA: tricial@support.ucla.edu or (310) 794-8604.

In addition to Nakanishi and Lippert, the members of the UCLA honorary degree task force are Anita Cotter, UCLA Registrar; Margaret Leal-Sotelo, Assistant Provost in the Chancellor’s Office; Gann Matsuda, Technology Director of the School Management Program at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies; Valerie Matsumoto, Professor of History and Asian American Studies; Karen Nakasato, Internal Vice President of the UCLA Nikkei Student Union; Julie Sina, Chief of Staff for the College of Letters and Science; and Paul Terasaki, Professor Emeritus of Surgery.

Additional information on UCLA’s honorary degree ceremony is available by clicking on Honorary Degrees for WWII Interned Students. You can also download a copy of their flyer about their event by clicking on the image above (Adobe Reader software required).

The University of California is still working to identify and locate former students who may be eligible to receive this honorary degree, even if their UC campus has already held a ceremony or event to confer the degrees (UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC San Francisco have already held their events; UCLA’s event is scheduled for May 15, 2010). If you believe that you are eligible or if you believe a family member or someone else you know may be eligible, please check out the University’s web site for more information: UC Honorary Degrees.

Related Story:
UCLA: A Wrong Finally Made Right

The following is a story from UCLA Today, UCLA’s faculty and staff newsletter. It is reprinted here with permission. Original story: A Wrong Finally Made Right.

by Wendy Soderburg, UCLA Today
February 12, 2010

Bob Naka
Photo: Harvard University

When Bob Naka was a UCLA student in the early 1940s, there was a campus bridge that led from the parking area toward the Physics Building.

“There was a deep ravine under that bridge,” he recalled. “It’s since been covered over, but you can still drive over it. People probably wonder, how come this road has sides to it?”

That is the UCLA that Naka, 86, remembers. The Concord, Massachusetts resident hasn’t been back to campus since the 1950s, just after the events of World War II wrenched him from a comfortable student’s life to that of an inmate at the Manzanar Relocation Center. Now, nearly 60 years later, Naka is returning to UCLA to receive an honorary degree in place of the one he was never allowed to complete.

He’ll be joined by approximately 50 fellow Japanese American students (or their family members) who were forced to leave UCLA in 1942 and sent to internment camps throughout the United States. They will be the special guests at an honorary degree ceremony to take place on Saturday, May 15, in Schoenberg Hall.

“In some respects, UCLA’s interest in recognizing the injustice of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 and the impact it had in disrupting the UCLA education of more than 200 Japanese American students goes back to 1992, when the Asian American Studies Center (AASC) worked to get [former student] Aki Yamazaki her UCLA diploma,” said Professor Emeritus Don T. Nakanishi, chair of the campuswide task force appointed by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Scott Waugh to organize the degree ceremony.

The awarding of Yamazaki’s diploma in 1992 was part of the AASC’s yearlong series of events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the mass removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, Nakanishi added.

Bob Naka, circa 1944

For Naka and the other Japanese American students who ended up finishing their degrees at other schools, UCLA’s honorary degree will be the perfect capper to their academic careers. Naka was forced to withdraw from UCLA in May 1942—after having completed three-quarters of his sophomore year—and was sent to Manzanar with his parents.

With the help of Manzanar teacher Helen Ely, however, Naka and several other students were able to enroll at other colleges that were located away from the West Coast. He completed his electrical engineering degree at the University of Missouri in 1945 and went on to receive a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 1947 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1951.

Daily Bruin headlines detailing the ban on Japanese Americans
in Westwood.
Photo: UCLA Today

Naka’s impressive career began almost immediately with his very first job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Project Lincoln, where he worked with other engineers to invent an automatic radar signal detection device that was used across North America to detect the presence of invading Russian bomber planes. On the flip side, Naka was soon enlisted to design aircraft that could escape detection, and his work on the U-2 and Oxcart aircraft became the precursor to stealth technology.

From 1969 to 1972, Naka served as deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Washington, D.C., a spy satellite organization whose existence the U.S. Government would not acknowledge. Years later, when Naka sat down with his former boss, John L. McLucas, the two men reminisced about how the time they had spent at the NRO was the most rewarding of their lives.

“John remarked that ‘only in America’ could I have traveled from being a distrusted American to one of the most trusted Americans,” Naka said. “We both marveled at that, and I thanked him profusely for his faith in me.”

Daily Bruin headlines on
the evacuation deadline.
Photo: UCLA Today

For his part, Naka remembers his UCLA days with fondness. “I thought life at UCLA was very, very pleasant. And I made very good grades,” he said. “In fact, the curious thing was that I outperformed all my high school classmates. Something happened that made me more connected to the classwork at UCLA at that level.

“My math teacher in high school, Ms. Thornton, came out to UCLA several times to talk to those of us who had gone to UCLA. And she said to me, ‘Something’s happened here. You’re outstripping everyone else,’” Naka said, laughing. “I told her, well, I think it’s kind of fun being here.”

Naka is scheduled to speak at the May 15 event at UCLA and will be joined on the program by Chancellor Gene Block; Professor Lane Hirabayashi, chairholder of the UCLA George and Sakaye Aratani Professorship in Japanese American Redress, Internment and Community; California Assemblymember Warren Furutani; and Edward Kobayashi, president of UCLA’s Nikkei Student Union.

“It’s never too late to join with others throughout the nation in recognizing that the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II was wrong,” Nakanishi said. “More than 700 UC students had to terminate their studies at UCLA and other campuses, and most never received degrees from these institutions.

To download a printable flyer detailing UCLA’s honorary degree program, click on the image above.

It’s too late for some students, although they will undoubtedly be there in spirit. Ron Takasugi knows that his father, Naoyuki, who died in November, surely would have attended the ceremony. Nao, who was forced to leave UCLA for the Gila River Relocation Center 50 miles southeast of Phoenix, was a former state Assemblyman and mayor of Oxnard, Calif.

“Dad was a true-blue Bruin all the way. Even though he graduated with a Temple and Wharton degree, he always supported UCLA and encouraged us to go there as well,” said Takasugi, who graduated from UCLA along with two of his four siblings.

“I remember him telling me that even with the war breaking out, no one ever treated him badly or shunned him and his other Japanese American friends. Life on campus is somewhat sheltered from the real world, and the faculty and other students did not have the same prejudices or views that the government had at that time,” he said.

“Dad would have been so proud to have received his diploma from the college he loved so much.”

For information on UCLA’s honorary degree ceremony, or if you, or someone you know may be eligible to receive the honorary degree, please click on Honorary Degrees for WWII Interned Students for more information. You can also download a copy of their flyer about their event by clicking on the image at right (requires Adobe Reader for printing and viewing).

The University of California is still working to identify and locate former students who may be eligible to receive this honorary degree, even if their UC campus has already held a ceremony or event to confer the degrees (UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC San Francisco have already held their events; as stated above, UCLA’s event is scheduled for May 15, 2010). If you believe that you are eligible or if you believe a family member or someone else you know may be eligible, please check out the University’s web site for more information: UC Honorary Degrees.

Related Story:.
UCLA Seeks Japanese American Students Whose Education Was Interrupted During World War II.

On January 19, San Diego State University’s NewsCenter published a story about their efforts to award honorary degrees to their former Japanese American students who were forced to leave SDSU due to their imprisonment in American concentration camps during World War II.

In “A Measure of Restitution,” Tobin Vaughn described SDSU’s research efforts to identity and locate those who may be eligible for the honorary degree.

To read the full story, click on: A Measure of Restitution.

Related Story:
SDSU: A Wonderful Gesture

California State University campuses throughout California will award honorary degrees to their former Japanese American students who were forced to leave their respective campuses during World War II, per California Assembly Bill 37, which was signed into law in October 2009. If you, or someone you know might be eligible, click on: California State University System To Grant Honorary Degrees To Japanese American Internees.

In their February 13, 2010 edition, the Rafu Shimpo published a story about Pasadena City College’s plans to honor their former Japanese American students who were forced to interrupt their studies at PCC and leave the college due to their imprisonment in American concentration camps during World War II.

In “PCC Graduation, 68 Years Late,” Susie Ling, Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at PCC, detailed PCC’s plans to award honorary degrees to their former Japanese American students per California Assembly Bill 37 (AB37), which was signed into law in October 2009.

She also spoke with Professor Dennis Lee, who teaches Asian American Studies and U.S. History at PCC, who said that awarding honorary degrees to PCC’s Japanese American students who were forced to leave the campus during World War II is an educational opportunity for current PCC students.

“AB 37, or the [California] Nisei College Diploma Project, not only allows us to correct a past mistake but it is a teaching moment," said Lee. "We hope to encourage our younger students to learn compassion as well as history. As part of this continuing education, we will be sending two buses of students on the Manzanar Pilgrimage.”

To read the full story, click on: PCC Graduation, 68 Years Late.

Community colleges throughout California will award honorary degrees to their former Japanese American students who were forced to leave their respective campuses during World War II, per AB37. If you, or someone you know might be eligible, click on: California Community Colleges To Honor Former Students Imprisoned During World War II.