Camp Otsuka Summary

During the internment, it starts as the family is on a train going to the camp in Utah. Otsuka changes the perspective so you can get a general idea of what others are thinking, and how they are handling this event. She tells you more about person’s personality and you can understand them better. This story is different from others because it is based on one person. The boy has nightmares and the mother is worried about her wrinkles in this chapter. While the girl was on the train on the way to the camp, she was told to pull the shades down. “There were the people inside the train and the people outside the train and in between them there were the shades” (Otsuka 28). Once they reach the camp they are assigned a room in a barrack for the son, the

daughter, and the mother. “Inside there were three iron cots and a potbellied stove and a single bare bulb that hung down from the ceiling. A table made out of cratewood. On top of a rough wooden shelf, an old Zenith radio they had brought with them on the train from California. A tin clock.

A jar of flowers. A box of salt. Tacked to the wall beside a small window, a picture of Joe DiMaggio torn from the magazine. There was no running water and the toilets were a half a block away” (Otsuka 51). This describes the items that the family had in their assigned room in the internment camp. Three times a day bells would clang and the smell of liver would drift across the entire camp. “On meatless days, the smells of beans. Inside the mess hall, the clatter of forks and spoons and knives. No chopsticks” (Otsuka 50). This explains that bells would clang when food was prepared. On the first day, the mother told the children to be careful and not touch the fence or talk to the guards, and never say the emperor’s name out loud. “Whenever the boy walked past the shadow of a guard tower he pulled his cap down low over his head and tried not to say the word. But sometimes it slipped out anyway. Hirohito, Hirohito, Hirohito” (Otsuka 52). In the camp, the Japanese-Americans were not allowed to say the emperor’s name because it was wrong. The boy remembers his father, who was taken away and was put into a prison “Whenever the son thought of his father on his last Sunday at home he did not remember the blue

suit. He remembered the flannel robe” (Otsuka 91). The son can only remember the robe and the slippers of the father.