Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

The novel, When the Emperor was Divine focuses on an average Japanese-American family that lived in the United States during the time period of World War Two. The author, Julie Otsuka, refers to the characters as "the mother," "the girl," "the boy," and "the father."Each member of the family was affected very greatly but much differently by the internment camps in which they were forced to live in. Being placed in internment camps made them act in ways they normally wouldn't. For example, the internment camp made the Girl rebel, while it made her brother step up to be the man of the house. Despite her being of Japanese descent, the Girl was your typical American pre-teen. Being not only born but raised in the united states, she only knew

Julie Otsuka’s novel When the Emperor was Divine leads the reader through the journey of one family that represents many as they are placed in an internment camp for the crime of being Japanese. Otsuka brings to light the persecution of Japanese-Americans through her use of symbols prominent throughout the book. Some of the most important being the symbol of stains, their family dog, and horses. Each has a double-meaning pointing towards the theme of widespread racism. Racism that led many Japanese-Americans into believing that they were guilty.

Japanese American families were sent to internment camps located at a desert in Utah almost in less than 24 hours during World War ll. It was supposed to be luxurious and a dream, yet it was the complete opposite. In the book, When the emperor was divine, Julie Otsuka describes each character and their stories through different points of views. She tells their story by recounting each of the main character's emotional experiences while showing the life of Japanese Americans and how they were labeled in others eyes. Otsuka writes not only about the venture of being taken to an internment camp, but how each character changes in the process. Through each person comes a story and why they changed into somewhat the opposite of their

There are many things that happened to Japanese-American immigrants during World War 2 that people in this time period aren’t really familiar with. A story from a Japanese woman, Jeanne Wakatsuki-Houston, who was born and lived in this era, with help from her husband, James D. Houston, explains and sheds some light during the times where internment camps still prevailed. The writing piece titled “Arrival at Manzanar", takes place during her childhood and the Second World War. In the beginning, Jeanne and her family were living a calm and peaceful life in a predominantly white neighborhood, until disaster struck the world and they were forced to move due to escalating tensions between Japanese Orientals and white Americans. At the time, Japanese-Americans, like Jeanne, were forced to live in an internment camp, which is a prison of sorts, due to the war with Japan. The text is being told through a first person point-of-view in which Jeanne herself tells the story through her experiences during the war. In that story, which contains only a part of the original text, much of the setting took place either prior to and during the time she was sent to the internment camps and describes her struggle with it. This story clearly states the importance of family and perseverance which is shown through her use of pathos, definition, and chronological storytelling.

Throughout the course of history it is apparent that racism is present in most societies. During times of war people of a certain race may choose to segregate themselves in order to become the leading power in their society. In his book, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War published in New York by Pantheon books and copyrighted in 1986, John W. Dower presents arguments for both the United States and Japan which constitute similarities in the belief of a superior race as well as illustrates contradictions on how each side viewed the war.

According to the novel Farewell to Manzanar, “I smiled and sat down, suddenly aware of what being of Japanese ancestry was going to be like. I wouldn’t be faced with physical attack, or with overt shows of hatred. Rather, I would be seen as someone foreign, or as someone other than American, or perhaps not be seen at all” (158). After the bombing at Pearl Harbor, the government saw all Japanese-Americans as enemies even though most, if not all of them, had done nothing wrong. They were taken from their homes and send to awful internment camps where they were treated as prisoners. The Japanese-Americans stayed in the camps four years, just because of where they come from. During this time Americans completely turned against the Japanese people living in their country and bombarded the news with anti-Japanese propaganda which showed how much racial discrimination there was, even back in the 1940s. While Farewell to Manzanar explores this concept, there are many questions in which the reader is left with. First, the Japanese-American Internment was fueled by more than war time panic, which reveals the question: what role did prejudice play in the Japanese-American Relocation? Then, there is the question: what modern day connections can you make with this time in American history? Lastly, this story leaves the reader with the question: do you think something like this could happen today? Farewell to Manzanar gives a glimpse of the lives of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s and

Have you ever been separated from your dad for a while? We already know that the dad’s love cannot be compared with another thing in the world. The relationship between a father and his son is one of the most important things in life. In the novel “When the Emperor Was Divine” by Julie Otsuka shows the relationship assists in making a boy recognize the love of his father while he is in the internment camp for a long time. We may see through the third chapter as the father and his boy encourage their self-confidence to overcome their own experiences of being separated from each other. We are able to see how this relationship become strong and how it is linked for the boy’s feelings. Through this essay I would like to prove the importance of the father and his son, and how they illustrated this love in the novel “When the Emperor was Divine”.

The autobiography illustrates personal experiences of discrimination and prejudice while also reporting the political occurrences during the United States’ involvement in World War II. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States government unleashed unrestrained contempt for the Japanese residing in the nation. The general public followed this train of thought, distrusting the Japanese and treating them like something less than human. In a country of freedom and justice, no coalition stepped up to defend the people who had lived there most of or all of their lives; rather, people took advantage of the Japanese evacuation to take their property and belongings. The government released demeaning propaganda displaying comical Japanese men as monsters and rats, encouraging the public to be vigilant and wary toward anyone of Japanese descent. The abuse of the Japanese during this period was taken a little too lightly, the government apologizing too late and now minor education of the real cruelty expressed toward the nation’s own citizens. Now we see history repeating itself in society, and if we don’t catch the warning signs today, history may just come full

The Japanese-American author, Julie Otsuka, wrote the book When the Emperor was Divine. She shares her relative and all Japanese Americans life story while suffering during World War II, in internment camps. She shares with us how her family lived before, during, and after the war. She also shares how the government took away six years of Japanese-American lives, falsely accusing them of helping the enemy. She explains in great detail their lives during the internment camp, the barbed wired fences, the armed guards, and the harsh temperatures. When they returned home from the war they did not know what to believe anymore. Either the Americans, which imprisoned them falsely, or the emperor who they have been told constantly not to believe, for the past six years imprisoned. Japanese-Americans endured a great setback, because of what they experienced being locked away by their own government.

In When the Emperor was Divine, the author, Julie Otsuka, uses her choice of narrator to represent the overall image of Japanese Americans throughout the war. At the beginning of the first chapter, the narrator is the mother who is very proper and clearly trying to fit in. This is demonstrative of how Japanese Americans were treated like any other citizen before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After the attack, the Japanese Americans became isolated and hated and were forced to leave their homes. When the mother receives an evacuation notice, she has to pack up and hide all of her family's possessions. The family has an old dog and she decides that she has no choice but to kill it. The Americans saw anyone with Japanese heritage as brutes who have no compassion and it is this belief that causes the mother to have to commit and brutal action. By using the mother as the first narrator, Otsuka depicts the change of the overall opinion of the Japanese Americans.

“Herd ‘em up, pack ‘em off, and give ‘em the inside room in the badlands”(Hearst newspaper column). Many Americans were feeling this way toward people of Japanese descent after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The feelings Americans were enduring were motivated largely by wartime hysteria, racial prejudice, and a failure of political leadership. The Japanese-Americans were being denied their constitutional rights, they were provided poor living conditions in these relocation camps, and by the time apologies and reparations were paid to the Japanese, it was too late.

Fighting a war against the oppression and persecution of a people, how hypocritical of the American government to harass and punish those based on their heritage. Magnifying the already existing dilemma of discrimination, the bombing of Pearl Harbor introduced Japanese-Americans to the harsh and unjust treatment they were forced to confront for a lifetime to come. Wakatsuki Ko, after thirty-five years of residence in the United States, was still prevented by law from becoming an American citizen.

officials eventually began to recruit these internees into the American army. Not only was WWII a war about political alliances and geographical sovereignty, but it was also a war about race and racial superiority throughout the world. Propagating this idea, Dower (1986) argues, “World War Two contributed immeasurably not only to a sharpened awareness of racism within the United States, but also to more radical demands and militant tactics on the part of the victims of discrimination” (War Without Mercy: p.5). In elucidating the racial motivations and fallout from WWII, Dower helps one realize the critical role that race and racial politics played during the war and are still at play in our contemporary world. An analysis of this internment process reveals how the ultimate goal of the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans and the United States’ subsequent occupation of Japan was to essentially “brainwash” the Japanese race into demonstrating allegiance to America.

→ The author shows the racism in American from a lot of sources; such as cartoons, official documents, advertisements, movies, and songs. The mass media drew Japanese people as an immature children (p.142) and animals. Especially, cartoons depicted the Japanese as monkeys, apes, rats, bugs, beetles, lice, and other kinds of creatures that had to be wiped out. (pp. 181-189) An example is that one restaurant sign on the West Coast said "This Restaurant Poisons Both Rats and Japs". (p. 92)

How the United States and Japan integrated “previously despised populations into their nations in unprecedented ways, while at the same time denouncing racial discrimination and even considering these peoples as part of the national populations and, as such, deserving of life, welfare, and happiness” (Fujitani