Hey listeners, we have something special for you, and it comes from our friends at the Inheriting Podcast, a show about Asian -American and Pacific Islander families, and how one event in history can ripple through generations.
And the episode we're about to share with you focuses on Japanese -American incarceration, which ended 80 years ago this week.
And 80 years might sound like a long time, but as we'll hear in this episode, just because Japanese -Americans could return home doesn't mean the experience ended for them or their kids or their grandkids.
But before we listen, I'm here with the host of Inheriting, Emily Kwang.
Emily, thanks for joining us.
It's so good to be here, Jasmine.
Thank you for having me.
I have known you for a long time.
Yes. You came to StoryCorps as an intern back in 2013, I think?
And your desk was like a sanctuary to me.
I would go and sit and talk about things, and ask you how you made StoryCorps, how you cut tape.
I really genuinely was looking for role models, and you were my first.
Do you remember this?
No. It's a mobile, and it has words hanging down on little strips of wood that say, like, remain intriguing, human, kind, gentle.
I made that? When you left your internship, and this hangs in my office, and I look at it every day.
Really? Jasmine, I forgot that I did this!
Yeah. Now you're making this incredible show.
What can listeners expect when they tune in?
Anyone listening to Inheriting, if they know anything about StoryCorps, knows that this show is a direct descendant.
From StoryCorps, when I was an intern, I learned how to do interview facilitation, I learned how to hold space for others, I learned how to, like, think in connection.
And as someone who's Chinese -American, who's the granddaughter of people who survived Japan's invasion of China, thus losing their home and fleeing, really, to eventually end up in the United States, I knew firsthand how much war shapes families, generations later.
And I have talked to so many Asian -Americans and Pacific Islanders who felt that way too, and they just didn't understand how to approach that as a topic.
Like, how do you even begin to ask your parents or grandparents about what they went through?
So I wanted to make this show for us, this generation, to model how to have those conversations.
So it's no surprise to me that, like, aside from the fact that we do play a bit of my StoryCorps piece in Inheriting, the whole approach to Inheriting kind of was inspired by what I learned was possible during that internship with you all.
So that clip you mentioned came from a StoryCorps interview that you recorded with your mom.
You know, as you said, this sort of thing isn't easy.
What was that process like for you 11 years ago?
I remember the StoryCorps production area was on the second floor of that office in Fort Green, Brooklyn, and there was a stairwell.
And there was one day that I just couldn't work anymore.
And I remember going into the stairwell and sobbing, and I didn't even know why.
And I knew it had to do with the reality that I was listening to all these conversations where people were coming closer together.
And I was feeling so estranged from my mom, because as you'll hear in the piece, she had a mental break two years prior, had really changed as a person, and had tried to take her own life.
And we had never talked about it.
And I didn't know how to relate to her anymore.
And the way that the internship worked is all the people who were doing it could interview anyone they wanted to.
It was like a pre -bonus in your internship.
And so I remember sitting down with you and saying, well, the obvious thing to do from a production standpoint is interview my mom.
Don't you think this interview would really be like a gem in the archive?
So I had my radio hat on and thinking that way, but as a person, I was doing it because I knew I needed to break the silence or else it was going to crush me.
The sadness, the feeling separated from your parent.
I didn't want it to go in that direction.
And I thought to myself, well, if we don't talk about it now, what if we don't talk about it ever?
And what if that puts a distance between us for years?
And then I don't want to look back and regret.
So let's just get this over with.
Yeah, Dave Isay always says, the microphone gives you the license to ask and say the things that you don't often feel like you have the opportunity to do.
And so I think you kind of lived that out, right?
Yeah. And I think because my mom felt so much shame, the thing about StoryCorps, when you bring someone to the booth, you're saying to them, you're special.
You have nothing to be ashamed of for the life you lived.
And I wanted to give my mom that experience.
So how did your recording with your mom actually inspire you to make inheriting?
Pulling that off with my mom, meaning the fact that my mom and I were able to sit down, look each other in the eyes for the first time in a year and a half and talk about the impossible was such a miraculous and life changing experience that I wanted to help others do the same.
You look around the world, especially now, there's so much divisiveness and so much disconnection and people who just do not know how to talk about unmentionable things.
And if I could use the tools of audio and interviewing to help people connect, there's truly no better way to spend my time.
And it's so clear in listening to this series that by making this podcast and talking about these difficult experiences and mental health struggles, I mean, you're really breaking cycles in real time.
Like, how does that feel?
Awesome. Genuinely to sit there and watch people open up about things to their spouses, children, cousins, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren.
We have all kinds of pairs and inheriting across these seven moments in history and see the warmth build between them and then stay in touch with them after the conversation about how their relationship has slowly shifted.
I mean, there's one episode focusing on a family who were impacted by the Vietnam War where the dad has promised to go on like a backpacking trip with his son to Vietnam, a place he said he'd never return to.
I know that that trip would not be in the making were it not for the fact that they were able to finally discuss this tension in their relationship.
That's amazing. So it feels very I feel very lucky.
Has your mom listened?
My mom has listened to inheriting and she loves inheriting, but ultimately she's so proud of me.
I think that the reason inheriting is so meaningful to my mom is because she's hearing her daughter be someone who has some of the same demons she has.
I certainly still struggle with depression.
I don't think you ever fully live without it.
And I wouldn't want to.
It makes me who I am and the sensitive person I am.
But she's hearing her daughter kind of use her natural empathy to connect with others.
And the first time we shared our story, the purpose of sharing it back then was to help others who had been in similar situation.
The purpose this time was really about telling my story as a person and supporting my continued healing as her daughter.
I think my mom really shared was willing to share it again for me.
And that just goes to show you how a conversation can have so many different purposes over time.
That's incredible. Yeah.
I do want to say this one thing, which is for anyone listening, if you have been on the fence about gathering an oral history or sitting down with a loved one, truly make it a priority this coming holiday season or new year, it will change your life.
You will not regret it and you will regret forever if you don't do it.
And it becomes too late.
And I say this as somebody whose life was changed by it personally and professionally and someone who's seen it again and again with others.
And you don't have to be a journalist or a therapist to do it.
And so I just want to give that permission and say inheriting.
We have a like a website.
It's a digital resource guide, alas .com slash inheriting.
And we have a lot of resources there about how to interview relatives and linked there is Storycore's Oral History Toolkit.
Storycore has the most unbelievable assortment of prep questions.
There's an app for recording an interview.
And so I just like cannot say enough about how much I mean it that that yes, this podcast is cool and all.
But probably the coolest thing is the podcast you'll record in your own family with your own loved ones.
That is quite the testament.
And I could not agree more.
And now let's listen to Episode 5 of the inheriting podcast called Leah and Japanese Incarceration.
Hi, I'm Emily Kwang.
This episode talks about mental health and intergenerational trauma.
We also talk about suicide.
If you or anyone you know has been having suicidal thoughts, I really recommend you call 988, the 24 hour suicide and crisis lifeline.
And if you are seeking mental health support or resources for processing this moment in history, visit our website, alas .com slash inheriting.
I've been talking to Leah Bash for almost a year now.
She tells a lot of stories about her dad, but the one that really lights her up is from a family party when her nephews were playing with Nerf guns.
And they didn't know that grandpa had a Nerf gun, too.
He was in a different room, but he could shoot at them through the doorway that was open.
So he started shooting the darts at him through the doorway and he thought he was so clever because they had no idea they were coming from that direction.
And when he would get really happy like that, he'd have this big smile and this big chuckle and these big round cheeks.
Those are the best memories I have of him.
Was he always that playful?
No, not always, which is what you know.
And sometimes people are totally opposite of what they normally are is when you're like, oh, wow, that's really memorable because no, that's not how he usually was.
Day to day, Tony Anaba was under a personal storm cloud, weighed down by work stress.
He ran the family business, Anaba Auto Parts in Riverside, California.
At one point, he ran a snowboard shop in Big Bear, and Leah still loves snowboarding and cars because of him.
But growing up, all three kids had to walk on eggshells around him.
Their dad could be mean, explosive.
When he got home, it was never, hey, how's it going?
How was your day? More like, hi, when's dinner?
Just his moods ruled the house like no one could be happy if their dad wasn't happy.
When he would get mad, he would tell us that nobody ever thought about him.
We were like, are you kidding?
All we do is think about you.
Selfish, mad. That was the family story about him.
He also had a lot of fear.
Fear of tomorrow, fear of what might happen.
So he didn't want my mom to not be by his side in case something happened medically, in case something happened physically.
What if he fell down?
What if he had an asthma attack?
So Leah became super sensitive to what her dad wanted and afraid of any negative emotions because her dads were so tumultuous.
She's still kind of like this.
If things aren't like 100 % happy, I get kind of like uneasy and anxious.
Like, OK, how do we how do we get this happy again?
How do we make happy?
But from her dad's nerf gun hideout, Leah saw a flash of someone else, someone relaxed and playful.
A side of her dad she didn't get to see too much.
Leah remembers when she realized her dad needed help.
When he was in his 70s, Tony developed high blood pressure and diabetes, went on dialysis.
And one day while he was sitting up in bed, he confessed to Leah that he couldn't sleep.
He started talking about panicking or waking up in the middle of the night panicking.
But it happened to him like nightly and on top of his asthma, which already gives him anxiety because he's worried he's not going to be able to breathe.
And it sounded to me like he was having panic attacks.
And they were happening every night.
Leah had never heard this before.
He said, well, what do we what do you do?
Like, what can I do about it?
I think I just said, you got to take deep breaths and you got to try to calm yourself down and that kind of thing.
OK, and how do you respond to that?
I think he just said something about it's really hard.
And I said, yeah, I know it's really hard.
Leah knew what to say because she had panic attacks, too.
A therapist had diagnosed her with an anxiety disorder a few months earlier.
The possibility her dad had one, too, made him seem way less scary.
Poor guy. Because we had been treating him for years like he was the problem.
Like he was grumpy all the time or he was a mean person or.
Selfish when really he was suffering and we didn't get it.
Leah remembers feeling a painful kind of kinship.
She wondered how their family would have been different if Tony had access to mental health care.
Her words jerked me back to when I was 17.
My mom was sitting at the end of my bed as I was trying to explain to her how I truly couldn't get up, how it felt like all the marrow had disappeared from my bones.
My mind was stumbling between numbness and suicidal thoughts.
My depression meant I was skipping so much school that the administrators were worried I didn't have enough credits to graduate, even though I just gotten into Columbia University.
Mom took me to therapy, supported me in getting on medication.
At one point, she got me this small purple teddy bear that she called Studebear to keep me company.
She didn't say anything about her own mental health.
I didn't know she struggled and I wouldn't even know to ask until years later.
For Leah, the idea that her father might be struggling with his mental health brought a new kind of clarity.
If they both had anxiety disorder, it had to come from somewhere.
She thought about her father's entire life and had what felt like an epiphany.
Maybe part of this had to do with his early childhood and what happened the month before Tony was born.
February 19th, 1942.
And that's the day when the executive order was signed.
Executive Order 9066 instructed all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast to be removed from their homes during World War II.
My dad was born in March of 42.
So he was a very, very, very small baby when they went to camp.
It was one of the most racist policies in US history.
Tony was incarcerated from the time he was two months old until he was almost four.
That was a family fact, but Leah had never seriously contended with what it meant.
And when she let it in, the heaviness of a child so young in a situation so horrible changed everything about how she saw him.
I don't have any proof of any of my opinions about camp, but I feel very strongly that you can't be born into such a traumatic situation and an unsafe situation as a baby without it having some effect on the trajectory of the rest of your life.
The rest of her dad's life.
And it turns out her life too.
I'm Emily Kwang. From LAist Studios and the NPR Network, this is Inheriting, the show where we take one historical moment and explore how it ripples through generations of a family.
Leah Bash is in her early 40s and has been trying to figure out where her dad's mental health problems came from.
It kind of started in 2020, the year she learned about her panic attacks and her fathers, the first year of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.
Leah had already been active in the movement for years, but that spring when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by the police, Leah thought even more about the racial trauma in her own family and their experiences with incarceration.
And she's started to see her dad's anxiety disorder as an aftershock of a history that lived inside of him.
In December 1941, the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor and the U .S.
declared war on Japan.
The sudden criminal attacks perpetrated by the Japanese in the Pacific provide the climax of a decade of international immorality.
The government moved Japanese Americans inland.
From the White House today came the most drastic action yet taken against possible fifth column activity, sabotage and spying on the Pacific Coast.
The government called incarceration a military necessity to prevent people from spying for Japan, even though two thirds of those people were American citizens.
And both sides of Leah's family, her moms and her dads, were sent to camp.
That's over two dozen relatives locked behind barbed wire for over three years.
I want to know what anyone else knows or thinks about this idea about camp affecting our mental health.
I want to know if other people share those opinions or have proof of them if they have diagnoses that stem from that.
Last year Leah got in touch with our show, wanting our help in interviewing her dad's side of the family.
She knows more about what happened to them.
But all her life, no one talked about mental health, certainly not in the same breath as camp.
And that was true of a lot of Japanese American families after the war.
The experience of camp was so humiliating and the pressure to avoid drawing negative attention so great that most maintained a conspiracy of silence after the war.
It's a reaction observed in trauma group survivors around the world.
Starting in the 1970s, social workers finally began looking into the physical and mental toll of camp.
Among those who had been incarcerated, they found many displayed symptoms of detachment and avoidance, both of which are associated with post -traumatic stress and clear evidence of poorer health.
In one doctoral dissertation from 1997, a researcher found that former incarcerates had twice the risk of cardiovascular disease and a 30 percent increase in the odds of premature death.
When I read this, it stopped me in my tracks.
If that is the toll of camp on the people who were there, what did it do to their children and grandchildren?
To Leah. The connection between intergenerational trauma and mental health is so complicated.
It's driven by so many factors, genetic, behavioral, environmental.
But still, Leah wants to be able to answer this question for herself.
Most of Leah's family stayed around Riverside, but she left ages ago.
She lives in San Diego with her husband, Scott Bash, and two rescue dogs, Theo and Roger.
Leah is a free spirit.
Expressive, green eyeshadow one day, pink the next.
During one visit, she jumped up to show me her wedding dress, which is black, and so poofy it takes up a third of the closet.
Scott remembers seeing her in it for the first time.
I had been nervous because she said her dress was black.
And I was like, really, like, are we going to a funeral?
But then when I saw it, it was awesome.
And she looked beautiful.
Leah grins at Scott.
She's been into him since middle school.
When she called herself Mrs.
Bash as a joke. She used to cheat off me in math class and seventh grade.
No, this is what he always leads with with the love story.
They reconnected as adults and moved into this house, which Leah owned with her parents.
For years, Leah pushed herself to become exactly the child her father wanted, a homeowner with a master's degree in education.
And she never pushed back against her parents.
I had been living my life for other people for many years.
And I didn't know it.
The house is cozy with a small yard.
There's nothing remarkable about it, but the yard actually set off a chain of events that brought Leah to rock bottom in the yard.
Her parents had planted all these trees.
They had green thumbs from generations of farming.
But no one had a conversation with me about, Hey, are you into watering trees and taking care of trees?
Leah was not summer of 2021.
Her anxiety was really bad.
She was having trouble functioning day -to -day in her job as an accountant.
Watering trees was the last thing on her mind and it showed when her parents came to visit that August, they saw the state of the yard.
Brown instead of green, overgrown, lots of weeds.
Her dad said nothing and then texted Leah the next day.
He said that the, we had let the yard slide and it looked like a rental.
We were akin to irresponsible sloppy tenants as opposed to the owner's kid.
It was definitely not a compliment.
I know these words sound harmless, but they were actually really destructive.
Her dad condemned the one safe haven that Leah had, her home.
To her, it felt like he was saying she wasn't worthy of the house.
At a time when her mental health was so fragile and it triggered something deep inside her.
So once I finally couldn't take it anymore, I broke out of the box screaming.
I started flying around the house really mad.
What was I like? Like I've never seen you before.
Leah was having a manic episode.
Scott couldn't recognize her.
That whole next week, she was like not stopping talking a thousand miles a minute, making lists of stuff and just going a thousand miles an hour all day, every day.
I was going to work that way too.
And I kind of exploded.
I got fired from my job that Friday.
I was afraid to go to sleep because I was afraid to fail at sleeping.
Like I didn't want to go to sleep because I knew that I couldn't sleep.
And so why even go to sleep?
I was already in bed and she came and woke me up at like midnight or something.
I was like pacing around the house.
I just couldn't settle down.
And said, I think there's something wrong.
I need to go to the hospital.
Leah checked herself into the ER.
And then they finally said that she had been transferred to psych hospital.
As I was talking to Leah and Scott, I was listening to every word of their story.
But I was also caving in on myself, thinking about my own story.
Our experiences are different.
Leah is Japanese American.
I'm Chinese American.
My mom is white. Our family traumas are our own.
Leah's story brings me back to the moment that my mom broke out of her box and became unrecognizable to me.
I was home from college for winter break.
And one night mom walked in the door with this far off look.
She couldn't form words.
I kept saying, mom, take off your coat.
Tried to ease it off her shoulders, but her arms were frozen in place.
Her eyes were darting all over the room.
And then a few days later, she had a panic attack and collapsed.
We brought her to a psychiatric hospital.
Someone sat us down and it was just me and my dad.
And the doctor said, I have something to tell you.
So did you know that she's been suicidal since she was 14?
His statement bounced off of us like gravel.
We had no idea. I tried to dissect each word of his sentence.
Mom, suicidal 14. What was he talking about?
She spent over two weeks in that hospital, emerging with the diagnosis of a major depressive disorder, panic disorder, and a whole slew of medications.
At night, when I was trying to fall asleep, I felt tethered to her.
I'd never experienced a mental breakdown, but I knew how terrifying it was for your mind to betray you.
I just didn't understand why she didn't say anything about her depression when I was so depressed in high school.
And I wondered, what does this mean for me?
Like how is my mental health connected to hers?
It was a painful kind of kinship, a lot like the one Leah shares with her dad.
And it's one of the things that brought Leah and I together while working on this story.
Leah was in the hospital for 10 days and received a life changing diagnosis of her own.
She had bipolar disorder, a mental health condition characterized by these intense shifts in mood.
A manic episode like the one Leah had was a sign of it.
When she got out, she wanted some space from her parents to figure out her medications and what she wanted from their relationship.
She didn't talk to them at all.
But a few weeks later, her dad had a heart attack and went into cardiac arrest.
She rushed to the hospital, but he was already in a coma.
The nurse had to come in and tell us like he's gone because it just happened so seamlessly.
And so I was just like beside myself.
She was distraught that he had died and that their last conversation had been a big fight.
I definitely realized when he died that I wanted to have a better relationship with him and I couldn't because he was gone and we could have had a different emotional relationship where I did help him with his anxiety.
And it turns out that Tony wanted to show up for her too.
When Leah had been in the psych hospital, her dad called Scott every day.
He really showed me in those times how much he really cared.
How much he loved me.
Because of just that routine he kept of wanting to know.
I could tell he felt really bad.
He didn't understand what happened.
He didn't know what he did.
He really wanted to make it right, but he just didn't know how his parents didn't express a lot of love.
I think he wanted to do better than that.
He wanted his kids to know that he loved them.
And I think he felt like he wasn't doing a good job at that or that he hadn't done a good job at that.
This was Tony taking a step in the last few weeks of his life.
She knows her family's dysfunction wasn't just because of camp, but she refuses to believe that camp had nothing to do with it.
The government just had no right to do what they did.
And they ruined real lives.
And when you think about the intergenerational aspect of it, I didn't I wasn't in camp.
I didn't go through that, but they ruined my life too.
You know, I'm dealing with things as an adult that are because of things that happened to me as a child, that are because of things that happened to my parents when they were adult and children because of camp.
That shouldn't have happened.
And when she looked across her family tree, a pattern was starting to emerge for her.
She had bipolar disorder.
Her father likely struggled with anxiety.
And then she thought about her grandmother.
Kiri Anaba had serious depression.
Everyone in the family knew about it, but no one really talked about it.
And camp felt like the key for getting her bearings on her mental health and her families.
So after her father died, Leah took a risk and texted the group chat with her mom and siblings thinking to herself, we can figure this out as a family and we can all talk about this and we can do therapy together.
And to my surprise, I got crickets.
And everyone just wanted to run as far away as they could from the subject and ignore me.
There were walls around this topic and Leah's text bumped right up against it.
Like I can't just call up a cousin and be like, hey, did your mom suffer mentally from camp?
It's not the happy subject that people want to talk about.
So she decided maybe she needed to start at the beginning, go back to camp itself with the laser focus on this question of how camp affected their physical and mental health.
Things she didn't know.
Her father's parents and several of his siblings had already passed.
But there was one person still alive and old enough at camp to have vivid memories of what it was like.
It was time to talk to Auntie Haru.
Haru Kurimiya is Leah's dad's second oldest sister.
She's 97 years old and of all the siblings, she's the one still alive who can fill in this big missing puzzle piece.
What it was like for Leah's dad during the earliest years of his life.
We're at Haru's apartment in Pasadena.
She has on a fleece jacket, is nursing a cup of tea.
And trying to remember how they're related.
So Tony's your dad?
OK. Isn't that amazing?
Well, so you've just grown up.
Yes. I'm a little old now.
The subjects of Tony Haru does not hold back.
He was spoiled rotten.
But it's my mother's fault.
You know, she just I guess she just loved being a parent.
Haru has clear memories of life before camp.
Of growing up on the Anaba family farm in Riverside on acres of land east of Los Angeles.
I love the farm. When it got dark, I would walk halfway down the driveway and it'd be so quiet and you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.
And I'd look up and you just see a brilliant star.
The Anaba started with row crops, strawberries and tomatoes.
But the real money came when they started selling eggs.
It was the perfect place for a kid to grow up.
Their mother, Kiri, also loved to sing.
A lot of this family history was documented by Leah's cousins, Reiko Fujii and Suzy Koromiya.
They gathered stories and photos into what they called the Anaba family farm book.
So my dad was the youngest of seven.
So Leah's grandparents, Chiko Yasu and Kiri Anaba, bought the land next to his parents farm in 1925.
It was illegal for Japanese immigrants to buy real estate.
So they had to make the transaction in the name of a younger sister who was an American citizen.
The farm is where all seven Anaba kids grew up and Leah's dad stayed connected to it his entire life.
He loved it when the family would gather from Mochitsuki to hand make mochi in preparation for the new year.
Joining his brothers and lifting the steam baskets over the fire, Leah went as a child.
That was definitely one of his favorite times of the year, getting together with his big family.
At Mochi. Farming was a way of life for Japanese families.
By 1940, their farms grew about 40 percent of California's vegetable supply.
That is, until Pearl Harbor and Executive Order 9066 to evacuate.
The Anaba family made arrangements with a white family to look after the farm.
Most Japanese Americans didn't have a safety net like this.
They just had to walk away from their homes and businesses, packing up only what they could carry with two hands.
Har remembers how sudden it was.
Everything was interrupted.
And we all had to pack up and just go leave the farm.
Her dad, Chika Yasu, was taken away first.
He was arrested along with his brother by the FBI.
I understand that most of the fathers were all taken.
He was moved from prison camp to prison camp.
Eventually put on a train to Santa Fe with the shades drawn.
Back in Riverside at the family farm, Kitty was eight months pregnant and she had no idea where her husband was.
And it was a few weeks later on March 18th that she gave birth to Tony, Leah's dad.
Everything was such a turmoil all at once and we had no control over anything.
And it just changed our lives.
That May 1942, Kitty and her now seven kids were put on a train to the Manzanar War Relocation Center, more than 200 miles from Riverside.
Haru at the time was 15 years old.
I just remember I missed the farm and my friends.
What's your most vivid memory of camp?
That it was a desert.
I remember the windstorms.
There were dust storms.
Haru flinches at the memory.
How the dust was constantly in her hair, her nails, on her skin.
Families were crowded into barracks.
Haru remembers being able to see between the wood slats on the floor.
Leah is quiet, bearing witness to what Haru and her dad went through and how it may have impacted their health.
I was worried about my mother.
Tony was so little.
He was about two months old.
Yes, he was just barely a baby.
Leah believes that this is where her dad's fundamental sense of fear began.
Where he got the constant nagging feeling that he wasn't safe.
That something bad was going to happen.
I mean, he was just born into this shell of a life versus what you should be having around you as a baby.
You know, it was definitely a luxury for reading time, or play time, or tummy time.
It was no tummy time, right?
Like, this is not the life of a baby.
In 1943, the family was finally reunited.
When they were moved from Manzanar to the Crystal City Alien Enemy Detention Center in Texas, Leah's grandpa Chika Yasu was there, and he had never seen his youngest son.
At that point, Tony was walking.
He was so cute. And everybody loved him.
And the Anapas would be in Crystal City for another two and a half years.
Until January 1946, four months after the end of the war, when they were finally allowed to go back to their farm.
This was highly unusual.
Many families had no home, nor land to return to.
Some were met with outright hostility.
There were signs all across California, reading No Japs Wanted.
Camp was such a hard time for everybody.
How do you think you got through it?
I just trusted my parents, I think.
I was so naive. I think if I were 15 today, I would question a lot more than I did then.
But no. But then again, Haru also says she was raised to keep a lid on it.
Growing up, if she or her siblings got hurt, she was told by her parents to suck it up and get on with it.
And that way of thinking applied to camp too.
Would Grandma say Shikataganai?
She said that a lot.
I think the Anapas learned that phrase pretty well.
What does that mean, Shikataganai?
What happens happens and there's nothing you can do about it.
I always learn it as, it can't be helped.
Yeah, it can't be helped.
Shikataganai was how the family survived the war, but also how they repressed their trauma.
On the whole, Japanese Americans didn't talk about incarceration with outsiders or really with each other for decades.
So while it's true that the Anapas resumed farming life, it's also true that those three and a half years in camp had left their mark.
And Lia is figuring out the shape of it, like an inkblot bleeding down the branches of the family tree, touching her too.
Lia started looking more into the science of her condition and discovered that of all psychiatric disorders, bipolar is the one most likely to be passed down within a family.
A lot of it is genetic.
But another thing that can trigger symptoms is a stressful, life altering event.
During one of our visits to San Diego, Lia flips to a section of a book she's been reading called Living with Bipolar Disorder, wanting to show me what she's learned.
Her eyes are totally lit up.
If it runs in your family, you have genes for the bipolar disorder in you, but they might be dormant and you might not ever develop bipolar disorder, but you could.
And what we know about trauma now is that it actually changes how your genes are expressed.
As Tony's child, there is a scientific explanation as to how Lia's bipolar could connect back to Camp.
And that bridge is epigenetics.
The branch of biology, which looks at how our environment affects the expression of our genes.
A traumatic event, or a period of stress, like Camp, has the power to punctuate genes with chemical marks that can signal to the body whether a gene should be read or not.
This explains how it's possible for descendants of trauma victims, people like Lia, to be affected by the trauma, too.
Trauma in one generation can leave imprints on our genetics, which may reveal themselves as conditions in later generations.
But if that's true, science is showing that the opposite is also true, that changing our environment has the power to put the brakes on cycles of trauma.
The body is just really fluid, and chemical markers on our genes are always changing as our environment changes, too.
Lia is looking at me with new interest, as I say all of this.
She knows how much I care about mental health and the well -being of families.
It's kind of the underlying force that's driving me to make this show.
But what she doesn't know is where that force came from, how my life changed after my mom got out of the hospital.
It was April 2012 when I got the call.
I was in the library, studying for my last semester of finals, sitting on the marble floor of the printer room, cradling my phone to my ear, because I had several missed calls from my dad.
This was the call I'd been dreading, but it still felt so out of body to hear my dad say it.
Emily, I'm really sorry to tell you this, but mom tried to commit suicide, and she survived.
She's at the hospital right now.
But, yeah, she's not in great shape.
Mom lived, but she wasn't the same after.
The unstoppable woman I knew had become undone by untreated lifelong depression and anxiety, and it terrified me.
I realized that if I didn't start taking my own mental health seriously, this could happen to me too.
So I left home and moved around a lot to four different cities in two years.
I opened myself up to therapy and medication, and I didn't call home much.
But I took study bear with me everywhere I went, this embodiment of my mom's love and hope for me.
In the years I was away, I realized that my path could be different than my mom's, and I have gotten the chance to tell her many times how proud I am of her for rebuilding her life.
Remind her that she is the fourth leg of the Kwang family table, made up of my sister, my dad, my mom, and me.
We recorded one of our conversations for the program StoryCorps.
I'm glad that you're alive, because to lose you would have devastated the three of us for the rest of our lives.
Yeah. And I would have never been able to see you come back from this, and that is the biggest lesson you'll probably ever teach me.
I mean, I know it's not over yet, but seeing you come back from this, I couldn't be more proud of you.
I can't believe that you can use the word proud, but it makes me feel like that bond between us will always be there, and during the darkest times, it was there.
When I listened back to this recording with my mom, I wish Leah had had a moment like this with her dad, that they just had more time to keep talking.
Maybe this project is her way of doing that.
After reading that book about bipolar disorder, Leah is ready to talk to her cousins about how camp impacted their generation.
She emailed two of them thinking that there would be crickets, just like the family group chat, but that's not what happened.
Her cousins replied, shared stories, and named different mental health -related disorders within the family that she never knew about.
And one cousin, Joya, wanted to have a conversation, because Joya's mom had bipolar disorder, just like Leah.
This was a major revelation for Leah, and it's why she wanted to have this conversation.
Leah likes Joya. She doesn't really know her.
They've just chatted at family events.
I'm a little fuzzy.
Yeah, and my Wi -Fi is really cheap.
And Joya's face, she's got the Anaba family grin, fills the screen.
And once we get on the call, it's clear, Joya is kind of kindred to Leah, a fellow free spirit who changed her last name from Hata to Heart, H -E -A -R -T, because she felt that fit her better.
The Wi -Fi is lagging, so we decide to turn the cameras off.
Sheesh, I put a bra on for nothing.
I know, right? They got dressed.
Leah gathers her breath.
They have never talked about the family's history of bipolar disorder before this.
This next question is a big question, but answer however you feel.
How would you describe your mom and two sets?
Well, she's very private.
She has terrible social anxiety.
It's been a pretty big hardship her entire life.
Did she have this terrible social anxiety with Anaba functions too, like from Mochi?
Yeah, I mean, it was like, you know, their family.
But she was so private that I don't even think the family knew that she had these major depressive episodes, that she had such big social anxiety, anything.
Yeah, we often don't talk about these things, right?
Right. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know your dad had such anxiety.
Yeah, my dad's anxiety was pretty bad.
Learning about a lot of it now, looking back, didn't realize it at the time.
Yeah, it's painful to hear about other people suffering than that.
And I just didn't know.
And I still feel that way about my mom.
I don't know how much her whole life she suffered.
I'm glad that we shared some of what we used to be secrets, so that I know more about what's happening with it in our family so I know that I'm not alone.
Leah knowing she's not alone, it's what I most want for her.
These frank conversations with Joya, with Haru, learning the science of her condition, are all weights on this scale of being less alone in navigating her intergenerational trauma.
It is exhausting work, but knowing her pain is shared is what's kept her moving forward.
She stuck with this project, with working with us, because she knows other Japanese Americans may be asking these questions too.
This was all traumatic experiences we suffered.
This wasn't just stuff that happened.
This is something people did to us.
We suffered from this.
And there's healing to be done.
It's not our fault if we have emotional issues.
It's because we've been scarred and we haven't healed.
And now we need to start the conversation about healing.
And doing some of that healing with other people.
Around the two year anniversary of Tony's death, Leah invited her mom and sister's family to join her in a small ceremony at the Japanese American National Museum in L .A.'s Little Tokyo.
This is the Erecho.
And it's 1 ,044 ages.
We're standing around the Erecho.
This massive blue book.
Almost a foot wide, with the names of the 125 ,000 people who were held in 75 incarceration sites.
The Anabas have their family farm book.
The Erecho serves a similar role, but for the collective.
So all of these lives are recognized in one place.
Visitors place stamps next to the names to bear witness to their experience.
Historian Karen Kano carefully flips through the pages.
So it's just a chance to restore each person's dignity and respect as they deserve.
So if each of you would come forward, this is the stamp that we use.
Beverly, Leah's mom, has brought a list of 23 names to stamp and Tony's name comes up.
Shizuo Anthony Inaba, 1942.
He was a baby, so he's at the back.
He was two months old.
And when it's Leah's turn, she gently touches the stamp below her father's name, leaving a kiss of blue ink.
Everyone else does the same, and it forms a row of five blue dots.
I ask Leah's family how it was to do this.
This was the family she once got crickets from.
And then her sister Amy Freider breaks the silence.
She's holding back tears.
I thought it was very emotional to see all the names and see our family in there, and to be able to honor and recognize them and that they were part of the camp.
And to have the stamping, it's really nice to be able to do that.
Stamping this book is the opposite of shikataganai, saying that incarceration could have been helped and that it was never okay, that all of these families deserved better.
And it's a moment where Leah is surrounded by her own family in saying that.
Three months after the stamping ceremony, we call Leah.
Over the phone, she tells us she's sought out even more professional help for learning how to live with her bipolar disorder.
She's enrolled in a partial hospitalization program, where she does group therapy and one -on -one therapy every day.
And it's the kind of therapy that's forcing her to really confront all these things she's repressed.
There's grief in realizing what trauma has done to her.
Sherry Wang, our consulting therapist on the show, says this is the path of this kind of healing.
Work gets so much worse before it gets better.
But that there is an arc, and there is a bend.
So Leah goes to therapy, goes on runs and walks when she can.
She's throwing all she has at this with Scott's support.
She's taking a journey that her own father could not.
He would tell us that nobody ever thought about it.
And I think he wanted to do better.
And those times, how much he really cared.
How much he loved me.
When she has the energy, she'll go to this place in San Diego called Seaforth Landing.
Tony loved getting out on the ocean to fish.
My dad used to fish out of several different places in his life, but this is the one he chose that he liked the most.
We suddenly see movement, a sliver of gray cresting above the water, diving for a fish.
Could be a dolphin for all I know from here.
A sea lion! I think it's a sea lion.
There's so much marine life out here.
I heard it when we were walking up from the parking lot.
He was working. Seaforth Landing is where Leah comes to talk to her dad's spirit about good things and hard things.
On the day we visited, she had big news for him.
Around 13 miles yesterday, I didn't think I could do it, but I actually did it.
So I'm really proud of myself.
I think you would be proud of me, too.
When Leah lost him, it's almost like she had to heal for two, find peace for herself, and extend that to Tony.
Say to him in death the kinds of things they didn't get to say to each other in life.
Today I talked to Scott about when you were talking to him while I was in the hospital.
And he told me that you wanted to raise your kids better than your dad and your mom raised you.
I never know what that meant.
But Scott says he thinks that you meant that your dad didn't show you love.
And I never thought about it that way.
You thought you didn't do a very good job.
But I knew you loved me because of how much you called and how much you cared and wanted to know how I was doing while I was in the hospital.
I know you loved me.
And I loved you. It feels like something is released across the water as Leah says this.
Tony did the best he could by his kids.
He didn't know how badly he needed help.
And the way that Leah is facing what she inherited marks a generational shift.
Through treatment, through changes to her environment, through all of that trauma work, she's staring down her family history and asking more of it.
Asking what healing is possible through it.
If Tony wanted the best for Leah, it's a legacy that she's trying to live by.
And that's what she's trying to do.
Next time on Inheriting, a Muslim husband and wife confront the dynamic that 9 -11 cemented within their family.
Inheriting is entirely funded by supporters like you.
If you found meaning in this story and want to hear future seasons, donate right now at laas .com slash inheriting and click the orange button to help us make season two.
Something really special is going on right now.
Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar thanks to Jihi and Peter Hu.
Please help us tell more of these stories.
Thank you. If you want to learn more about any of the historical moments we talk about on our show, visit our website, laas .com slash inheriting.
We have put together a variety of resources for you, as well as lesson plans from the Asian American Education Project.
Inheriting is hosted, reported, and co -created by me, Emily Kwang.
The show is a production of LAist Studios and distributed by the NPR Network.
Anjali Sastry -Karbichek is the senior producer and co -creator of the show.
This episode was produced by Anjali and sound designed by James Chow.
Minju Park is also a producer on the show.
Sarah Saracen is our senior editor.
Catherine Mailhouse is our executive producer and director of content development at LAist Studios.
Shaina Naomi Krocmal is our vice president of podcasts.
Mixing and Engineering by Donald Paz.
Original theme music composition by E.
Scott Kelly. Fact checking by Caitlin Antonios.
Our intern is Tony Morales.
Podcast Tyler by Christina Chung.
Visuals by Samantha Helou Hernandez.
Social media and video by Christine Malixi and Josh Latona.
Jenz Campbell is our production coordinator.
Our consulting psychologist on this episode is Sherry Wang.
Special thanks to Bryan Diaz and Arielle Isibidi for guidance on epigenetics.
Please see our website for mental health resources to learn more about these topics and find support.
Thanks also to Donna Nagata and Gwen Jensen for research on the health impacts of Japanese American incarceration.
And to Karen Kano at the Japanese American National Museum for showing us the IRECHO.
Special thanks to Reiko Fuji for archival material of the Inaba family.
Additional archival tape from Steven Smith at the APM Reports Podcast, order 9066.
And NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition programs.
Research by NPR's Will Chase.
And thank you to StoryCorps for letting us include an excerpt of that interview with my mom.
Editorial thanks to George Kiriyama and Irene Noguchi.
And to our binge listeners for further editorial support.
Natalie Janofsky, Emma Alabaster, Erica Washington, Aisha Mokiwala, Marlee Foyer Worker Otto, Stephanie Rotoper, Kaitlyn Hernandez, Bonnie Ho, Jenz Campbell, Antonya Serahido and Kristin Muller.
And a big shout out to my family.
Linda Kwong, Christopher Kwong, Amanda Kwong, Duncan Coltharp and Natasha Branch.
I wouldn't be here without you.
Support for Inheriting is provided by Jihee and Peter He and Cafe Bank.
This podcast is also supported by Gordon and Donna Crawford, who believe quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live.
San Diego. San Diego.
San Diego. You are my sunshine, my only ungily.
You make me happy when skies are gray.
You'll never know dear how much I love you.
Please don't take my ungily away.
If it's... That's gonna go on the episode.
No it's not. Yes it is.
No it's not. No, dream on girl.
Dream on girl. Dream on.
Dream on. Dream on.
