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MN: Can you share with us a little bit about Rabbit in the Moon and how that concept came about? Was it Emiko your sister who first came up with the idea or did you two, were you two talking about it?

CO: Well, I had been very active in redress and she was not. But I would talk about what we were doing and all this sort of thing. And you know, I think I've told you all this, about being involved in the Hohri case and also I had interesting stories to tell about going to the Supreme Court and all that. So I just talked about it off and on. And the Seattle group, the hard core of about seven or eight people, were very diligent. We met very faithfully once a month or more often. We had a lot of organized activities, we put out a newsletter, we commemorated February 19th all the time. And there was Frank Abe and Frank Chin was around, and so when I look back on it, those were great times. We were just really doing stuff. But I think really the unconscious push to do all of this was because the whole thing was a very painful experience and it was sort of like gradually trying to deal with the anger and the hurt and just the sorrow and everything that was part of that experience, and it was just beginning to come to the surface for me anyway. So that was a great outlet, to be active in redress. 'Cause we wrote letters, we went to our congressmen, and oh gad, all sorts of stuff. We had to have fundraisers all the time to keep it going. And then being part of the lawsuit also kept me very informed because I would get these legal briefs and stuff like that. Not I read them all and all that, but it's just that I had all that material, so I started learning more and more about it. Like when did I find out about "no-no" and stuff like that? I don't know. But just as these bits of information kept coming up, it just became very fascinating to me. And I must say I spent some years just being kind of obsessed about it all. But then, a lot of people were around, so I could just ask them all kinds of things about various people's experiences and things. And there was more and more literature coming out. It was like a tipping point or something. And all of a sudden a lot of stuff came out.

Again, the business about the "loyalty questionnaire," I got into a deep study of that just simply accidently through Aiko Yoshinaga Herzig. Then it really hit me that there's so much about this that most people don't know. Even those who experienced it don't know these things because most people, they could remember their own personal experience and maybe a little bit about some people in other camps and all that. But as far as the big picture, the overall picture, there just was not enough general information out there. Now, if you're a scholar, and after all, Peter Irons is writing books like Justice at War and all those, they were out there, but it was not the kind of thing that the average Nikkei or the average person anywhere would have read. So it just seemed like, gee, people ought to know about this somehow. But then how do you do that? I could write a book.

As a matter of fact, when the... no, that's later. So it was around... let's see, when was the redress thing passed? About '88? I think '88, yeah, and it was about a year or so later. I was digging into this like that, and I said, "Gee, somebody should make a documentary about this." Somebody else, not us, somebody else. So we started asking various professionals, especially in the Asian American community, "Would you be interested in making a documentary about this?" And most people weren't. We asked a number of people, and we didn't get anybody who was seriously committed to doing this kind of thing, so we finally just said, "Well, I guess we'll have to do it ourselves," which turned out to be the best decision. The reason that we decided that is that if we wanted a certain side of the story to be told, it would have to be told by us, not somebody else. Not JACL, not 442nd, because those people, they already had films and lots of public exposure. Whereas all this other stuff had not had the exposure. And Tule Lake was the most fascinating story of all. I thought we would make a documentary just about Tule Lake. But that wasn't feasible either because who would know what Tule Lake is if they didn't know about all the camps and all the other parts of it all? So then I'm saying, "Man, to tell this story right, we'd have to have a series of about eight or ten episodes, but then who's going to give us money to do that kind of thing? There were so many layers and there were so many different aspects and everything. And I was aware of all that, but it was like, well, we'll just shoot for at least one. And it really would have to be aimed toward a general audience, the American public in general or something like that. So that's why we narrowed it down to... let's see, turned out to be eighty-five minutes to one documentary of that length.

MN: When did you decide to bring in your family story?

CO: Well, that was later, of course. It's because, as we were going along and my sister was kind of trying to shape up some kind of narrative, and so she said to me one day, "I need certain bits of information to fill the gaps," to hold the story... from all the different interviews that we had done, that there'd be something that kind of helped bridge certain gaps that we have here. So we just sat down in her kitchen and just started this rambling story. And she got fascinated with it because I'd never talked about a lot of this stuff with her. So she got sort of interested in the family history, the family story, because she was only a year old when we went into camp. So she didn't remember the camps, she didn't remember the prewar stuff or any of that. So she got real interested in it. So she was having other people transcribe our interviews, and one person said to her, "Hey, this is really interesting," about our family story. So I didn't want to be in this thing. I thought I was just giving out... because I did at that point already know a lot about the camp history, so that we would just use bridge information. But then I think the transcriber was a friend of hers and she says, "You got to use this stuff." She said, "No, we don't want to drag our family into this." But after a while, they did, her friends persuaded us that this is one way to have a thread through the story by tying it to one family, which is us, because knew ourselves, or we had the pictures and things like that. So reluctantly I said, "Well, okay." Anyway, but every time there would be a rough cut and I would say, "Cut me out of that." [Laughs] But anyway, I was in Seattle and she was in San Francisco and so I didn't get too much veto power at that point.

[Interruption]

CO: Frank Chin and Frank Abe had gotten started on their resisters project, and so we were in a little bit of a friendly competition about who would finish first or who would get this grant or that grant and that kind of thing. So in a way, we were egging each other on at that point, so I remember that, we used to laugh about that. But we got more grants than they did at that point. [Laughs]

MN: And you finished, came out with it a year early.

CO: Yeah, we came out early, so too bad. [Laughs] Oh, well.

MN: Now, the title of the movie, Rabbit in the Moon. In Japan, the image of the rabbit in the moon is very well-known, but not here in America. Where did you get this concept? Is this something that your mother used to tell you?

CO: I guess. Like I think there were little storybooks and stuff like that, but the image of the rabbit with the hachimaki around his head and the mochi, pounding the mochi, was something that was really embedded in our minds, so I guess it was stories that were told to us. You know what? When I was in Tokyo, I went to a big bookstore asking for children's books, 'cause I wanted that. I couldn't find a single one. So I would ask the clerks and they didn't know anything about such a story. So who knows? It's kind of faded out of their literature. But anyway, actually, my sister chose that image. I didn't like it, but she just overrode me, so that was that. It turned out that, in a symbolic sort of way, it's something that catches people's attention, so I can see why it's nice to not have like... what was mine? "A Question of Loyalty." Well, that was much more eye-catching than something so legalistic.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.