UCLA awards degrees to interned Japanese Americans

A lifetime ago, the Yamaguchi family labored long and hard in a chop-suey shop in downtown Los Angeles to send their son, Kei, to university, hoping it would give him the chance for a better life.

World War II interrupted the immigrant family’s dreams, but on Saturday, Kei Yamaguchi finally received his degree from UCLA — almost seven decades after he left.

“It feels great,” said the 91-year-old Yamaguchi, who is still active in the family termite-control business.

He was among 48 Japanese Americans who were awarded honorary degrees, some posthumously, in a special ceremony at the Westwood campus.

All were from families forcibly relocated to camps after Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 9066. In one of the darker chapters of U.S. history, more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, were interned.

Among those shipped to camps were about 700 University of California students from four campuses, including UCLA. Some ended up earning degrees at other universities; others never returned to college.

Read the rest of this story by Patrick McDonnell in the Los Angeles Times . . .