Degrees atone for 1942 wrongs

The applause lasted nine minutes as dozens of Japanese Americans whose education was cut short after the bombing of Pearl Harbor filed into an auditorium Sunday at the University of Washington.

It was the start of an emotion-filled event in which the UW awarded 450 honorary degrees. The students, now mostly in their late 80s, were forced into internment camps or to other parts of the country in 1942 after President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that effectively banned Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

"A great injustice was committed in 1942, and we have come to acknowledge that injustice and pay tribute to those who triumphed so brilliantly over it," said UW President Mark Emmert to a crowd of about 900.

Board of Regents Chairman Stan Barer added that awarding the degrees was the most important action any of the regents would take during their tenure.

More than 65 of the World War II-era students attended the event, as did more than 110 family representatives standing in for other students who had died or who were too frail to attend.

Keynote speaker Norm Mineta, the former U.S. transportation secretary who, as a boy, was held in an internment camp, choked up at times during his speech. He said that the day Pearl Harbor was bombed was the first time he'd seen his father cry.

"The look on my dad's face was total anguish," he said. "There was no doubt where his loyalties lay. Unfortunately, that was not something every fellow American or the government was willing to understand or believe."

Mineta said the UW students at the time were simply doing what all Americans are told to do — to study hard, to get a degree and to make a unique contribution to the world.

"It's never too late to do the right thing," he said. "It's never too late to rejoice that the right thing has finally been done. And it's never too late to be grateful to those who do the right thing."

Among those awarded degrees Sunday were sisters Tomiko Yamamoto, 85, who was a freshman in 1942, and Tama Tokuda, 88, then a senior.

"It brings back all those memories," Tokuda said after the ceremony. "It revived all that emotion of the time. It was a crazy time we lived in."

In 1942, the sisters were sent to the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. Although Tokuda later took correspondence courses, she never did finish her English degree — instead becoming a homemaker. She pointed out four of her children at Sunday's event as evidence of how successfully that career had turned out.

Several UW faculty attending had their own connections to the event. Tetsuden Kashima, a professor of American ethnic studies, spent three years in an internment camp as a young boy. Mike Eguchi, a marketing lecturer, accepted a degree for his father, who died last year. Barer, the board chairman, said his parents quietly helped out two Japanese-American families in their hometown of Walla Walla by paying their mortgages and taking care of their affairs while they were interned.

One man who surprised many by attending was Ryo Kumasaka, 88, who had expressed ambivalence toward the event — despite having helped inspire it after telling his story to a UW faculty member. Kumasaka said his family had persuaded him to attend.

"There are a lot of people here who I recognize their names, but they have changed so much I didn't recognize their faces at first," he said. "I'm glad I came. ... It was worth it. Now I have to go home and watch the baseball game."

Nick Perry: 206-515-5639 or nperry@seattletimes.com