UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Emperor Hirohito leads the LYBs, the little yellow bellies, who claim the rising sun for their own.</s>TAYLOR HENRY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): That was the mood of America during 1942, when 120,000 people of Japanese descent were rounded up by the government and sent to internment camps.</s>GREG LEFEVRE, CNN SAN FRANCISCO BUREAU CHIEF: Growing up in the west, we had always heard about the story of the internment camps. As a young boy, I went to visit several of them with my parents, perhaps as a history lesson. Our parents were World War II veterans, and they were proud of what their country had accomplished and what they had accomplished; at the patriotism during World War II. But it was always mixed with a measure of embarrassment, of shame over what had happened with the Japanese internment during World War II.</s>SUSAN KAMEI, FMR. INTERNEE'S DAUGHTER: My grandparents' generation and my parents' generation were denied basic Constitutional rights of due process of law before they had deprivation of their liberty and property.</s>BERT NAKANO, COAL'N REDRESS & REPARATIONS: You have a guard there, and you have your people in this compound. And you say to yourself, being Japanese is not good.</s>LEFEVRE: Many of us knew many of the Japanese families who lost businesses, many who lost farms, many whose relatives had perished in those internment camps. The $20,000 itself was such a small amount, it almost seemed to exacerbate the embarrassment, to enhance the shame.
CNN 20: Japanese-American Reparations, August 4, 1988