The Theme Of Identity In Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

A person has to face the consequences of being something they are not and leads a journey to find more about themselves. This is the main dilemma an eight year old boy faces in Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine which takes place during World War II. The family is forced by the government to have to stay in an internment camp due to being of Japanese ancestry. However the boy is an American citizen and confuses him which leads to long reflection of himself trying to evaluate his circumstances. The boy tries to find his identity in an attempt to understand why society marginalizes him which reveals how one may question their place in society as a response.

The boy at first believes that he is much more in line with the American

The symbol of the baseball glove shows his connection to his American identity rather than his Japanese side. Baseball being a sport that is very popular in the West rather than Japan is a representation of his identity. Before the start of his life as an outsider his identity is as an American boy much more than a Japanese boy. Another instance of the boy being more American is when he reflects on a time he lived in horse stalls and asks himself, “Did he want to ride the horses? He did”(Otsuka 31). Once more the rhetorical question of him deciding if he wanted to be a jockey shows his interest with more “American” values. The only reason he questioned the decision was because his sister told him he’d grow up to be a little man and he worried about what society would make of him. He wanted to be a horse rider and is shown to admire cowboys and outlaws which causes him to be able to call himself American. To him it’s more appropriate to think of himself as so because it is the culture he has grown up with and shows much more. A more extreme instance of his thoughts

When they returned to their home, the kids tried to be as American as they could be, “We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs”(Otsuka 114). The parallelism in the structure of what they would do amplifies the fact of how they did not want to be American. The actions they took all were an effort to try and be more American and hide their Japanese roots. Due to being marginalized for being Japanese the boy tries to show that he is American so that he would never have to go through a traumatic event like that again. Furthermore the boy shows a newfound hatred towards his Japanese identity as when he looked at himself in the mirror when they were back home he “did not like what we saw” (Otsuka 120). The word choice of “did not like” exemplifies how he does not like being Japanese anymore. A mirror only reflects the outside of oneself which for the boy would be his Japanese identity and not his American identity since it's only visible on the inside. The dislikement of his outer self reveals how he has become bitter towards his Japanese ancestry from all the marginalization it has brought him with no benefit. The boy once more attempts to remove his Japanese identity when he dreams in the camp about being a soldier in the war and how, “General