Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

824 Words2 Pages

From Their Perspective Racial discrimination in America has, unfortunately, persevered through the ages and still continues today. After the events of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese American citizens were looked upon by their neighbors with disdain. Julie Otsuka’s short but impactful novel, When the Emperor was Divine, follows a Japanese family living in California and the lifestyle changes they followed during this time period. These changes include living in an internment camp and the effects of being away from home for so long, among other things. Otsuka uses a person versus society conflict in order to display the mistreatment Japanese Americans faced during WWII and how the Internment camps affected their lives. Therefore, representing …show more content…

Being given ID tags instead of just using the names of the prisoners is extremely dehumanizing for them. Rather than being treated like people, the orchestrators of the internment camps view them as livestock to be tracked. Their identities were stripped away completely and replaced by a number that could easily be forgotten. The characters in the novel tried their best to hold onto what they could of themselves. Though she was the one who discarded her cultural memorabilia, the mother still tried to stay connected to her home. “Every morning. she reached for the key as soon as she woke, just to make sure it was still there” (Otsuka 107). The house key around her neck was one of the few things that the woman had left of her home back in Berkeley. The prisoners weren’t able to bring much with them since they were forced to live in dilapidated horse stalls, so she held onto the items she was allowed to. Even though the prisoners were denied their humanity by the government, they kept close to their identities the best they …show more content…

Because the general public tends to put down the Japanese, the family feels the need to cover up who they are. By constantly being treated like an unwelcome outlander, the Japanese American family started to view themselves as “The cruel face of the enemy” (Otsuka 120). Due to racism from the community, the Japanese Americans were hypnotized into believing that all of them were at fault for Pearl Harbor, which was simply not true. The family in the novel started denying their heritage and destroying any of the cultural items they owned just to keep up the image of ‘loyal Americans’. The attitude from neighbors and life in the internment camps damaged people more than what was mentioned before, though. The father was taken to a camp because he was classified as an alien. Later coming home a changed man- and not exactly in a good way. “He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back to our father’s place” (Otsuka 132). Whatever the father went through at the internment camps changed his mentality completely. He used to be easygoing and very friendly to strangers, but he came home totally paranoid. He stopped trusting strangers and avoided leaving the

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