20:30

When we talk about debt, we often mean a kind of personal debt that comes from borrowing money and paying it back. But there’s another kind of debt – when someone has wronged you big time, and now they owe it to you to make it up somehow. The U.S. government is no stranger to this kind of debt, or this kind of big wrong. There was slavery. And what happened to the Native Americans. And then there was what happened during World War II.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. rounded up 120,000 people of Japanese decent and put them in internment camps. Nearly two-thirds of them were American citizens. Years later the U.S. government would apologize and pay reparations to people who had been held in the camps, but it took decades to make that happen.

In this story, Chiye Tomihiro and Sam Ozaki, two survivors of internment, describe how they went from being seen as model citizens to being seen as the enemy, and how they fought to get what was owed to them after the country admitted its mistake.  They tackle the question: how do you pay someone back when what’s been taken away is their  basic human dignity?

This piece was produced as a collaboration between Robin Amer and Jesse Seay, and narrated by Jesse.