When The Emperor Was Divine Summary

Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942, called for the incarceration of Japanese Americans after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy. It is one of the most controversial topics of the twentieth century, and even today Americans are still in disbelief that this occurred in the so-called “Land of the Free.” There were mixed opinions about whether or not the United States government had the right to place Americans of Japanese descent from primarily the west coast of the United States into internment camps. The government stated that it was only trying to protect Japanese Americans considering there was an increasing amount of hostility and discrimination towards them as World War II carried on,

Non-Japanese Americans started discriminating against Americans of Japanese descent and these Japanese Americans were treated poorly in society. They were not allowed in certain places and had trouble finding jobs because of their Japanese ancestry. Discrimination against Japanese Americans is prevalent in Julie Otsuka’s book titled When the Emperor was Divine. This discrimination had damaging effects on Japanese Americans, especially the children. The best example of this in the book is the passage on page 57 when the boy is thinking about why he was placed in the camp. Being just a little boy, he does not understand what he did to deserve all of the discrimination and torment that he received prior to being in the camp. He then concludes to himself that he must have done something terribly wrong in the past and all of the harsh treatment is punishment for those mistakes. “Breaking a chain letter from Juneau, Alaska. Flushing his dying pet goldfish down the toilet before it was completely dead. Forgetting to touch the hat rack three times when the iceman drove by” are a few examples of what he came up with (Otsuka 57). Obviously these are all minor faults of the boy and would never constitute the discrimination and torment he went through prior to being

The boy in When the Emperor was Devine describes them as "a city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain" (Otsuka 49). In Professor Inouye’s lecture titled “World War II Internment of Japanese American Citizens,” she discussed what it was like to live in the camps. “Entire families shared one room with one light bulb, their possessions were searched by officials, they were kept behind barbed wire with armed guns pointed at them, and if anyone was seen outside of the fence, they were shot dead immediately” (Inouye, Feb 12). Professor Inouye also talked about the lack of medical care in the camps and that there was quite a bit of sickness that went around. In some cases people died due to not having sufficient medical treatment and because there were few or no doctors in the camps. They lived like this for almost three years, which were full of unnecessary torture and