The Rabbit In the Moon

The Wall Street Journal


RABBIT IN THE MOON
 

Don't let the cryptic title and seemingly familiar topic of the POV deter you. Emiko Omori's wrenching first person look at the U.S. Internment of Japanese-American men, women and children during World War II probes far deeper than other documentaries on the subject, revealing painful fissures within the Japanese community that still have not fully healed. Ms. Omori raises issues of collaboration and of loyalty, of passivity and resistance, in which the Japanese American Citizens League -- the only group designated by the government to represent the internees -- is seen in a stark, unflattering light.

The JACL, we learn, counseled stoic acceptance of evacuation and internment as the way to prove loyalty to the war effort, and it later urged young men in the camps to volunteer to serve in the Armed Forces. But, according to the film, the JACL never took the position that Japanese-Americans should be able to exercise all the rights afforded other American citizens -- including those of German and Italian heritage, who had not been asked to sacrifice their freedom and property.

It is undisputed that the Japanese-American soldiers who have figured so prominently in recent films served bravely and with distinction. But the young men who chose to lead resistance to the draft when it was instituted in the camps in 1944 showed a different kind of courage. Ms. Omori interviews Frank Emi, who with the six other members of the Fair Play Committee argued that until the U.S. restored full citizenship rights to the draftees and their families, internees should refuse to serve. "The administration and the Japanese Citizens League both mounted a campaign to discredit and isolate the Resisters," Ms. Omori says. "We were made to feel that the only way to be loyal Americans was by unquestioning cooperation with the government, whatever its cost to us."

According the Ms. Omori, 315 men refused to be inducted and 263 were convicted and sentenced to federal prison. Mr. Emi spent 18 months in Leavenworth, and was released in the spring of 1946, a few months after a higher court reversed the convictions of the committee members. In December 1947 President Truman pardoned all the Resisters and restored their citizenship rights.

The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 1999


The New York Times

Reviewed by Claudia Dreifus

EXAMINING SCARS FROM A WARTIME AMERICAN TRAUMA
 
Emiko Omori's documentary Rabbit in the Moon begins on a personal note. "Why I didn't have children," Ms. Omori announces while showing pictures of Japanese-American children growing up in the sunlight of pre-World War II California. "I used to think it was not having a stable relationship or money. But since my childbearing years are over, another possibility came to light."

That possibility is that the three years she spent with her family in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in the Arizona desert so scarred her that Ms. Omori's ability to create continuity was permanently impaired.  Emiko Omori was one and a half years old in 1942 when she, her parents and her two older sisters were "evacuated" from their home in Oceanside, Calif. A year after the family's release from the internment camp system, her mother died from a bleeding ulcer. The urn containing the mother's ashes was lost. The Omoris never spoke much again about the mother or the camp years.
 
Rabbit in the Moon, which will be shown on the PBS series, P.O.V., on Tuesday night at 10, is at once personal and political. It focuses on the loss of civil rights for some 120,000 Japanese-Americans, supposedly for their protection and national security, and also on the toll the camps took on the individuals imprisoned. Italian-Americans and German-Americans were not interned.

"Working on this film showed me how internalized oppression can get so that you might make life decisions without realizing why," Ms. Omori explained in a telephone interview from her home in San Francisco.
"It wasn't conscious," said Ms. Omori, 58 (in fact, she has almost no memories of the trauma), "but I'm so angry. I'm mad at my parents, my Government."

To make that early piece of her life whole, Ms. Omori and her sister Chizuko, 69, a Seattle writer and researcher who worked as the film's co-producer, spent seven years assembling Rabbit in the Moon.
The documentary which won the best cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, shows the intimate side of life in the camps. Through interviews with survivors and through newly discovered home movies, Ms. Omori fills in the human story. A young bride talks about spending her wedding night on a straw mattress in the camp barracks; men speak of having refused draft notices, which they received in the camps, for the United States Army; an inmate recalls how she memorized every page in the Sears catalogue, her only link to the outside world.

"I was very inspired by Primo Levi," Ms. Omori said of the Italian author. "by his little descriptions of life at Auschwitz."  The "relocation centers" were not Auschwitz, of course, but the psychological constructs of children of the Holocaust and children of internees are similar. As Emiko Omori explained, "When you go through experiences of this type, you are implanted with feelings of how vulnerable you are, and you get careful. You always worry about it happening again."

Making this film has calmed some of the Omori sisters' second-generation anxieties. "It was a relief to me to find out that the community stood up and resisted," said Emiko Omori. "My cousins resisted the draft. Working on the film made me feel more proud of them." 

And sometimes making movies creates its own kind of closure. After Rabbit in the Moon was shown at Sundance, a distant relative found the Omori mother's ashes, lost for more than half a century, and offered to return them.

Claudia Dreifus, The New York Times, July 4, 1999