Grace Obata Amemiya, left, laughs with Taye Oda while holding up a UC Berkeley shirt after speaking to the University of California Board of Regents in San Francisco, Thursday, July 16, 2009. The University of California is granting honorary degrees to hundreds of Japanese Americans whose studies at UC were interrupted when they were sent to internment camps during World War II (Photo from the Associated Press)

Growing up in northern California in the 1930s, Grace Obata Amemiya assumed she would attend the University of California, Berkeley. Two of her older brothers and a sister were Berkeley-educated. Why would she not be?

But Amemiya's college days were abruptly interrupted in 1942 when the United States herded her and 120,000 other Japanese Americans on the West Coast to inland internment camps amid racist sentiment during World War Two.

Thanks to a gesture by the UC Board of Regents, she is among hundreds of individuals who qualify for a special honorary degree from the same institution that had spurned them during war hysteria. "This is long overdue, but truly awesome," says Amemiya, an 88-year-old retired nurse now living in Ames, Iowa.

In the wake of Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order calling for the expulsion of anyone of Japanese descent in "military areas" - which included the state of California. Among those affected were about 700 Japanese Americans enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs at four UC campuses - Los Angeles, Davis, San Francisco and Berkeley.

Amemiya, for instance, was attending UCSF's nursing school, as part of her third year of a Berkeley education, when she and her family were given about a week to pack and prepare to leave. The family car, for instance, was sold for a measly $25. She and her family boarded a train - each of them limited to whatever they could squeeze into two suitcases apiece - that took them to a desolate camp along the Gila River in Arizona. Across all internment camps, the terms of confinement varied, but some stretched for as long as four years.