Government Conflict In Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

Jett S. Backer

Mrs. Vermillion

Honors English 10

20 March 2023

Analyzing the Government Conflict in When the Emperor was Divine People all around the world have been wrongly oppressed for things that they didn’t do. When the people that get wrongly oppressed they usually get angry at the people that oppressed them or traumatized. In Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine, the characters, which are Japanese-Americans, are oppressed and have to deal with people that don’t like them because of their race and have to deal with the effects of that because the attack on pearl harbor really made the government worried about Japanese spies. Julie Otsuka uses a person versus society that shows that the government put Japanese-Americans in internment

As the characters in this novel are Japanese-Americans the government takes them to an internment camp in Utah. However, when they got there they were treated like an animal or less than a person. “Then they would pin their identification numbers to their collars and grab their suitcases and climb onto a bus and go to wherever it was they had to go” (Otsuka 22). It says that they had identification numbers on their collars so they can’t even go by their real names and they didn’t even know where they were going. This has a long term effect on the main characters and all the people in the internment camps because its like they are losing part of their identity because they couldn’t go by their names so they realize that their identity is not valued enough to be recognized with a name. Even when they were losing their

The Japanese-American people are oppressed and disliked in society. The people of America dislike these people because the government told them about the war against Japan, Pearl Harbor, and that the Japanese-Americans could be spies and help aid Japan in the war. “They said they’d been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store” (Otsuka 67). The government has put Japanese-Americans in internment camps and because of that the American people believe that all Japanese-Americans are bad and made the Americans hate them. This could have long term effects on those people because some of them have been severely hurt or even killed and it might make them hate the people that did that to them. So for the people that are hurt or almost hurt, what happened to them can create severe mental problems. When the father returns home from his internment camp in New Mexico he seems different. “Now whenever we passed his door we saw him sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap, staring out the window as though he were waiting for something to happen. Sometimes he’d get dressed and put on his coat but he couldn’t make himself walk out the front door” (Otsuka 137). The father was put in a different internment camp than the mother, boy, and girl, and now he is back from the internment