Filmmakers' statement
Rabbit in the Moon is our memoir, two sisters who were incarcerated for three and a half years, between 1942 and 1945, in Poston "Relocation Center" in Arizona. We were at that time ages twelve and year and a half when our family of five was picked up from our strawberry farm in Southern California and put on a train, not knowing where we were going or for how long, with 120,000 other Japanese Americans in the months of March, April, and May of 1942. We were barred from returning to the coast until the end of 1944.
Too young to understand what had happened, the two of us emerged from the concentration camp after the war's end to begin life anew, to struggle with the rest of the Japanese Americans to put back together our violently broken lives. After the years of incarceration, there was relief in being given the freedom to resume normal lives, and yet our inner landscapes had been irrevocably altered by having been punished so severely for our ancestry, to have had our identities so intensely questioned.
Years later, as a serious movement for redress was building up, we began to reflect on those lost and obscured childhood years, obviously a formative time of growing up but which had remained largely unexamined. A series of questions came up: What exactly had happened? Why had it happened? Why have those years been so repressed? And, most importantly, what was the meaning of it all?
In the course of looking for answers to these questions, what began as an historical inquiry became a personal quest, a search into the past which proved too painful, maddening, and terribly sad. And there arose in us a feeling of resentment that, somehow, we had been conned into thinking that it wasn't so bad or so awful, that it hadn't harmed us that much. No, it wasn't anything like the Holocaust suffered by the Jews in Europe so we should be grateful that we had been treated so decently.
The reality that we uncovered in the course of our research was more appalling than we had imagined, along with the growing realization that not only the American public, but we ourselves had little or distorted knowledge of what had happened. We embarked on this seven-year project to begin to fill the gap that exists in our history books and in our family history. What emerged was another example of white racism directed against peoples of color, this time with a twist, for it was coupled with an inordinate hatred of all things Japanese whipped up by a concerted propaganda barrage against the enemy, Japan.
We did not all go quietly and passively. Many internees questioned and protested against what was done and were punished for their actions. The community was torn by conflict and strife resulting in gulfs which still exist today.
White racism has had a very long history in our country, as we know, and this time we found out how far the government was willing to go including the trashing of our constitution when the racist agenda called for it. This is an important piece of history that needs to be exposed.
-Emiko and Chizuko Omori, Producers
Too young to understand what had happened, the two of us emerged from the concentration camp after the war's end to begin life anew, to struggle with the rest of the Japanese Americans to put back together our violently broken lives. After the years of incarceration, there was relief in being given the freedom to resume normal lives, and yet our inner landscapes had been irrevocably altered by having been punished so severely for our ancestry, to have had our identities so intensely questioned.
Years later, as a serious movement for redress was building up, we began to reflect on those lost and obscured childhood years, obviously a formative time of growing up but which had remained largely unexamined. A series of questions came up: What exactly had happened? Why had it happened? Why have those years been so repressed? And, most importantly, what was the meaning of it all?
In the course of looking for answers to these questions, what began as an historical inquiry became a personal quest, a search into the past which proved too painful, maddening, and terribly sad. And there arose in us a feeling of resentment that, somehow, we had been conned into thinking that it wasn't so bad or so awful, that it hadn't harmed us that much. No, it wasn't anything like the Holocaust suffered by the Jews in Europe so we should be grateful that we had been treated so decently.
The reality that we uncovered in the course of our research was more appalling than we had imagined, along with the growing realization that not only the American public, but we ourselves had little or distorted knowledge of what had happened. We embarked on this seven-year project to begin to fill the gap that exists in our history books and in our family history. What emerged was another example of white racism directed against peoples of color, this time with a twist, for it was coupled with an inordinate hatred of all things Japanese whipped up by a concerted propaganda barrage against the enemy, Japan.
We did not all go quietly and passively. Many internees questioned and protested against what was done and were punished for their actions. The community was torn by conflict and strife resulting in gulfs which still exist today.
White racism has had a very long history in our country, as we know, and this time we found out how far the government was willing to go including the trashing of our constitution when the racist agenda called for it. This is an important piece of history that needs to be exposed.
-Emiko and Chizuko Omori, Producers
