Chizuko May Omori (b. 1930), a young Nisei girl, was living with her family in Oceanside, California when World War II broke out. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Omori and her family were incarcerated in Poston concentration camp (known officially as the Colorado River Relocation Center) in Yuma County, Arizona. After release from the camp, Omori lived for a time in Los Angeles, and moved to Seattle around 1978. In 1999, Chizuko Omori produced the film "Rabbit in the Moon," directed by her sister, Emiko Omori. A documentary and memoir of Japanese Americans in American concentration camps during World War II, the film is framed by the story of the Omori family, and told in the first-person voice of Emiko. The film won many awards, and was broadcast nationally by public television in 1999.
Chizuko Omori was also active in the campaign for reparations to Japanese American individuals incarcerated during the war. She was one of the 19 plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit, filed by the National Council for Japanese American Redress in Washington D.C. in 1983, alleging violations of the plaintiffs' rights to due process; equal protection under the law; protection from cruel and unusual punishment and protection from unreasonable arrest, search and seizure. The lawsuit sought $25 billion in damages for more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. The case was ultimately dismissed by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in May 1988, but was arguably influential in the passage of the CIvil Liberties Act of 1988, which granted reparations of $20,000 to each surviving Japanese American who had been incarcerated by the United States government during World War II.
This photo of Chizuko Omori was taken the day the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was passed. Omori is shown in her Seattle home, with photographs of the Japanese incarceration, mostly showing family members, hanging on the wall behind her.
Caption information source: "Hirabayashi Ruling May Bolster Redress Efforts," Seattle Times, February 19, 1986, p. H1 Chizuko Omori oral history interview at the Densho Digital Repository, retrieved at http://ddr.densho.org/narrators/553/ Caption information source: Densho Encyclopedia, "National Council for Japanese American Redress" at http://encyclopedia.densho.org/National_Council_for_Japanese_American_Redress/ Caption information also derived from captions written by Post-Intelligencer staff and attached to the back of the photograph.
