Big Island resident Bruce Tanaka was midway through his sophomore year at UCLA, preparing to attend law school, when war broke out with Japan.

He was among the 700 students at four University of California campuses — Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Davis — who were forced to abandon their studies in 1942 after President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order giving the military the power to confine residents with ties to Japan.

More than 120,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated to internment camps.

Sixty-eight years later, 19 of the relocated students will receive honorary degrees tomorrow at a special ceremony at UCLA. An additional 26 diplomas will be mailed to former students who cannot attend.

For others, like Wiley and Setsuko Higuchi, who have died, family members will don the traditional black gowns and accept the degrees. Representing Higuchi will be his son James, who lives in Los Angeles, and his grandson, Stephen Franz, a 2005 'Iolani School graduate who hopes to attend UCLA law school.

Tanaka, 87, who lives in Papaikou on the Big Island, will get his diploma in the mail because he suffered a stroke a few years ago.

It was his daughter, Lisa Kamibayashi, who read about UCLA's efforts in the newspaper and contacted the college for him.

Tanaka, the eldest of eight children, was allowed by his parents to transfer from Hilo High School at the end of his junior year to live with relatives in Southern California. After graduating from high school there, he enrolled at UCLA in the fall of 1940.

Tanaka told his daughter that UCLA was “;much more difficult than high school,”; and he never went back after his release from the relocation camp at Rohwer, Ark.

“;I believe he's pleased about the thought that he is going to have this even though it is only an honorary degree,”; Kamibayashi said. “;I think it is something that he will be happy to celebrate.”;

Frances Franz said her parents, the Higuchis, did not know each other when they attended UCLA. Wiley Higuchi's family was first sent to a temporary relocation center at Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, Calif., and then finally to a camp on the Gila River on an Indian reservation in Arizona.

Her mother, then Setsuko Nomura, had to drop out of UCLA in 1941 to help her parents run a family store in South-Central L.A. She was relocated with her family to Heart Mountain in northern Wyoming and later earned a nursing degree.

Franz said her son, who graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois on Sunday, became interested in law school after learning what his grandfather went through.

Her father, who died in 1999, was classified as 4-F because of a childhood illness and taught fifth grade at Gila River relocation camp. He had two brothers — Rowan Takashi and Joe Higuchi — who ended up serving on opposing sides in World War II.

Franz said her uncle Rowan Higuchi earned a master's degree in architecture from Harvard University but moved to Japan before the war and was drafted. His brother, Joe, volunteered and was assigned to Military Intelligence Service, serving in Japan after the war as an interpreter where he accidentally ran into his brother while on a train.

Franz said her father was allowed to leave Gila River to attend DePaul University at night while working days in Chicago, where he eventually obtained a law degree, married her mother in 1947 and returned to Los Angeles.

Franz, who graduated from UCLA in 1974, said her mother “;wanted someone from our family to graduate from UCLA.”;

“;What I am feeling is great joy,”; Franz added, “;because even though my parents are dead, I know because of the trauma of what they went through, some healing is taking place because my father and mother are being recognized for something they weren't able to accomplish.”;

A University of California task force recommended last year that the 700 students, whether living or dead, be awarded honorary degrees.

In 2007 the Oregon Legislature approved a similar measure relating to college students evacuated from that state.