Each honorary degree, issued by the University of California rather than a specific campus, will include the Latin phrase Inter Silvas Academi Restituere Institiam: To restore justice among the groves of the academy. Justice was a long time in coming for these former students, many are now well into their 80s. "I would urge you to issue these degrees in all due haste," Escort Regent Leslie Tang Schilling said during the committee hearing before the full board vote. "It's getting late." UC officials were working out the details for officially conferring the degrees in the fall or spring at campuses where the students attended. On Thursday, 67 years later, the University of California Regents formally acknowledged the historic injustice, voting to grant special honorary degrees to the hundreds of former students like Amemiya who never finished their UC education because of the World War II Japanese American internment.

The decision ended a 37-year ban by the University of California on granting honorary degrees. The regents authorized the suspension of the moratorium exclusively for the interned students, living and deceased. ypjzdqr0909 About 700 University of California students were sent to internment camps in 1942. A few hundred of them later earned their UC degrees, finishing their studies in the camps, where professors arrived to push final exams through the fences, or after the war. They won't receive honorary degrees. About 400 individuals, many of whom graduated from college elsewhere, will be eligible for the honorary degrees - the first conferred since 1972, said UC officials, who are cross-referencing records in an effort to find them. Among those on the list to receive them are Harvey Itano, the first Japanese American elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and George Ichiro Nakamura, killed in action in 1945 in the Philippines and posthumously awarded the Silver Star.

"A whole race of people were removed and interned out of fear," Regent Eddie Island said. "We embrace this as a way to express our profound sorrow and regret." Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The order excluded anyone of Japanese ancestry from military areas, which included California. Amemiya was a student at the UCSF nursing school when she and her family were given seven days' notice before being sent to Turlock, a temporary stop before they boarded a train for Gila River camp in Arizona. Now 88 and living in Iowa, she said the forced internment was hard to accept. "It was a shocking experience," she said in testimony Thursday Escort before the Regents Committee on Education Policy. "And yes, you can start your escort over again with just two suitcases." She never moved back to California. She earned her nursing degree in Minnesota after her year in the camp, later serving in the Army escort Corps, where she tended to injured soldiers, many of them former prisoners of war in Japan. "We, with patriotism in spite of prejudice, did our best," she said. Even as she raised a family and grew older, Amemiya said she couldn't forget her childhood wish to graduate from Cal. "This is a dream I was living all this time," she told the regents. "Please know our hearts will be full of joy."

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