When The Emperor Was Divine By Julie Otsuka

The state of knowing someone is the best feeling cause your safe and can depend on someone for advice. The world is wonderful with many different people. The kindness of being friendly and generous is an affection to be worthy to someone. The book When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka, a Japanese American author, has engrave the detail in which people live through the internment camp during World War II. The camp split many families apart and didn’t know where they were going to. Yet to give the feeling that you know that person, like a family member that you don’t know but somehow you do. The father was divide from his family later to realized he’s not the same person.
The author happens to tell a family whom they regard the father as a stranger. The

strange thing is how the author has the boy describe the Japanese prisoners as his father. The chapter 3, the boy was thinking that his father’s face was seen in the adult male prisoners. This male prisoner looks like his father by the yellow skin, high cheekbones, and his slanted eyes in which the boy called him out. After finding out, the stranger’s face, the boy was unknowable and inscrutable of whom his father is. At this moment the boy in fact find his father a stranger cause he doesn’t know how he looks like. His father was a whole new person to him to what happen.
Before the father was arrested he was different, he sang songs, drew, and play with his children.

The changed of the father experience point of view was the last chapter. He tell a moving message which he says, “I’m your slant-eyed sniper in the trees. I'm the saboteur in the shrubs. I'm the stranger at the gate. I'm the traitor in your own backyard. I'm your houseboy. I'm your cook. I'm your gardener. And I've been living here, quietly, beside you, for years, just waiting for Tojo to flash me the high sign. So go ahead and lock me up " (page 143). He was trouble of what he did and he wanted to show that he wasn’t scared. A stranger at the gate is reference to his children not knowing who he is as a person. He lived a normal life as a houseboy which he cook and do others like gardening. All of the those years, he didn’t know what to expect from himself. Yet his message was a mystery at the end of the chapter cause we as a reader don’t know what happen next. Before he was capture, he was fun-loving, yet at the time at the camp he was strong. He became lifeless after returning, for all those crimes he committed. Time has scarred him for whom he used to be, wondering about the suspicious of everyone he

knew.
The Americans are let to suspect that the Japanese Americans to betray them when the World War II happen. The issue of the conflict between both country lead to the father arrest, which separated him from his children and wife cause he was Japanese. Upon the story showing that the family felt ignored and not belonging in the area, it was an act of judgement. They can’t choose who to be or what race they want to be because the story shows that race is controlling their life. Unlikely of the internment camp, people were bound to behave and many of them lied about their race to avoid being caught. The idea of the internment camp was the set of fear American had on the Japanese being spies.