Hundreds of former UC-Berkeley Japanese-American students whose educations were interrupted by World War II and Japanese internment will graduate this month alongside current students.

The product of Assemblymember Warren Furutani’s Assembly Bill 37, signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger last October, the legislation calls upon University of California schools, California State Universities and California Community Colleges to issue degrees to anyone whose education was interrupted by Japanese incarceration.

“The main motivation is that it’s under the heading of ‘unfinished business,’ tying up loose ends,” Furutani said. The Japanese assemblymember has been working toward granting degrees to the former students for decades.

Serving on the Los Angeles Board of Education before being elected to the State Assembly, Furutani organized a high school cap and gown graduation for hundreds of Nisei—the children of emigrants from Japan, in this case second-generation Japanese Americans—who similarly had their high school educations interrupted.

“I’ve always thought: ‘what about those folks who were in college and then they got pulled out of college by Executive Order 9066 and were not given the opportunity to finish?’” he said. “For me, the motivation is that our Nisei are almost gone, and this was something to correct past wrongs.”

Legislation Long Overdue

Duncan Williams, who serves as associate professor of Japanese Buddhism and chair of the Center for Japanese Studies at UC-Berkeley, believes the legislation is long overdue.

“Of course I think it [AB 37] should’ve come a long time ago,” Williams said. “In my opinion, I would have hoped and thought that the UC system… would be a leader, but it seems like we’re at the tail-end.”

However, Williams points out that the UC system has a history of abstaining from issuing honorary degrees of any kind. In order to issue said degrees, the UC regions had to additionally vote to suspend the regulations. With the degrees approved, approximately 400 former students or families of students—UC-Berkeley had the largest population of Japanese students pre-WWII—will be among the first people in decades to be issued honorary UC degrees.

The ceremony will run jointly with the regular undergraduate graduation; Williams, who serves on the ceremony’s campus planning committee and who will be reading the names of the Japanese graduates, hopes the university’s undergraduates will be able to learn something from the Nisei.

According to Williams, a number of private schools on the West Coast have already issued similar degrees. However, Furutani states that private schools, not falling under governmental jurisdiction, cannot be mandated to do so.

It is Stanford’s policy not to issue honorary degrees. Japanese students who formerly attended Stanford during WWII and were forced to leave were honored at a ceremony in fall of 1993, but no honorary degrees were given.

“I can’t recall having received such an honorary degree,” said former Stanford student Eric Andow (’48), who was forced to leave campus when he was incarcerated in Colorado and subsequently sent overseas as part of the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

The ceremony was “just to reunite some people that were at Stanford at the time,” Andow said, and was attended by then-University President Gerhard Casper. Although a much larger population of students were forced to leave Stanford, only nine made it to the ceremony. Among the nine, several were able to re-matriculate post-war and finish their degrees—a course that UC-Berkeley students were unable to take.

“I was taking an engineering course, so it’s hard to try to continue from that point when you left… but I managed somehow because I was interested in getting the degree more than anything else,” Andow said. He returned to achieve a degree in engineering.

Mixed Emotions from Former Berkeley Students

For former UC-Berkeley freshman Jim Yamasaki, the honorary degree he will receive this winter is worth less than the hardships he overcame by having his education interrupted.

“Having received my B.S. degree in engineering at Northwestern in 1949, the honorary degree for my freshman year is nice PR for somebody and is appreciated as a gesture but really… why bother?” he said.

Originally from San Joaquin County-Tracy, Yamasaki was an excellent student, receiving nearly all As in school and working toward becoming the breadwinner of his family. His studies were interrupted, however, when his father’s liquor license was suspended, disabling the family business of running a tavern in Tracy. Curfew restrictions then forced him to return home.

“There were bigger problems than [the] interruption of my education… I had no time to worry about school,” he wrote in an e-mail. Shortly after returning home, Executive Order 9066 uprooted his family and relocated his life to the horse stables of the Turlock county fair grounds, and eventually to Gila Rivers Relocation Center in Arizona.

Yamasaki was unable to return to UC-Berkeley but found other methods of finishing his education. He emphasizes there were many, such as himself, who overcame them and found different paths to success.

From inside Gila Rivers Relocation Center, Yamasaki applied for a scholarship to leave camp and resume his studies elsewhere. He was accepted on a scholarship to the University of Utah, where he was subsequently drafted despite boasting the best grades in his classes among white students who were allowed to defer.

He became a 2nd Lieutenant and was transferred to military intelligence, ending up in Japan on occupation duty in counter intelligence. He spent the next year writing secret reports from field information for General MacArthur’s staff.

When Yamasaki returned to the states, he struggled to find a school that wasn’t already packed with GIs from the GI Bill or that would accept Nisei students in the post-war prejudice.

Yamasaki managed to matriculate into Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., thanks to the admission interviewer, who graduated from UC-Berkeley the same year he was forced to leave. He became the first Japanese American to go to Northwestern tech school and earned a B.S. in 1949 in Electrical Engineering.

Cedrick Shimo was faced with numerous challenges as well, but unlike Yamasaki, had his graduate education at UC-Berkeley interrupted by the draft. Shimo received his Los Angeles draft notice the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but was ironically refused passage on the train to L.A. because he looked like the enemy.

Shimo eventually volunteered for the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) and was transferred to Camp Savage in Minnesota. Just before graduating from the MIS language school, he was expelled for protesting a rejected furlough. He had asked for one in order to say goodbye to his mother before being sent to the Pacific Front, since no Japanese Americans were allowed on the West Coast.

He was transferred to the 525th, a special unit for “troublemakers,” demoted to the rank of a private, and eventually was reorganized into the 1800th, a similar unit for “malcontents.” When the war ended, he received an honorable discharge.

Shimo has spoken about his experiences of defying authority at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and UCLA, where he previously earned his undergraduate degree.

Though he is unable to attend the Berkeley graduation ceremony, he appreciates the degree.

“At least I got proof that I was in graduate school in case somebody doubts it,” he said.

While there is no deadline for California public institutions included in AB 37 to issue the degrees, Furutani stressed that time is of the essence.

“As you know, the average age [of Niseis] is 86 or 88—there’s no deadline, but literally they’re passing away, and if we don’t get this done right away, more and more are going to have to be given away posthumously.”

The first of the ceremonies will be held by UC-San Francisco on Dec. 4, followed by UC-Davis on Dec. 12, UC-Berkeley on Dec. 13 and UCLA in the spring.