Inheriting: Leah & Japanese American Incarceration

Yeah No, I’m Not OK

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, we bring you an episode from Inheriting Season One. Inheriting is a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families, which explores how one event in history can ripple through generations.

Leah Bash is an avid runner, a dog mom, a wife – and there’s a part of her family’s history she can’t stop thinking about. The fact that both sides of her family were incarcerated alongside 125,000 other Japanese Americans during World War II. Her father and his six siblings spent more than three years behind barbed wire at isolated camps in Manzanar, California and Crystal City, Texas. After Leah learns about her father’s struggles with panic attacks and is herself diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she starts to wonder: could those experiences at camp during World War II have far-reaching consequences a generation later?