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

“I love you, you know I would do anything for you.” People tend to do crazy things in the name of love. To the extremes, love can influence us in many ways. Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine perfectly depicts this unnatural power. The woman, man, girl, and boy face many conflicts throughout this novel. Doing so, Otsuka shows how they face and overcome it all and it’s seen how love has the power of doing evil and good. It's common for people to be patriotic; many people do truly love their country. When it comes to being capable of evil, where is the line drawn? In this novel, because of the government’s patriotism in America, they lock up Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan. This is said in the book:

An innocent little boy watches as the FBI takes his father away. This shows how love has the power of evil. The ones in authority’s love for America and patriotism caused them to do evil by mortifying not only the little boy, but the wife and daughter too. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor being bombed, Order 9066 was executed which locked up these Japanese Americans into “relocation centers” but better known as internment camps. Conveying that since they were Japanese, and Japan was the one who bombed them, America didn’t trust them even if they had nothing to do with it; as a result, innocent people suffered from the xenophobic government. They were, “Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: NO JAPS ALLOWED” (Otsuka 67.) By calling Japanese-American slurs and even denying them right of entry to

The father in When the Emperor was Divine had two kids: a boy and a girl. He was arrested as a suspect of being a spy for Japan but even so, that didn’t stop him. Despite being miles away from his family, he didn’t let it get rid of the time he got to spend with his daughter because, “He had written to her every week since his arrest last December and she had saved every single one of his postcards” (Otsuka 34-35). This shows how much this family truly loves each other and how this love can even help them get through this tough time during WWII. Even though the father is locked up and ripped away from his kids, he still makes it a point to write to them. This is truly love since he does it every week; the daughter even keeps all of them. The simple fact that she receives that letter from him every day can be motivation enough for her to stay strong because it can give her something to look forward to; it also gives the dad something to do every week because he knows now that his daughter would be expecting it as to not worry her by randomly stopping the letters. Even though the letters may be small, it still can mean so much as words are very powerful. Here is one of the letters he wrote to them: “On December 7 it will have been a year since I last saw you. I read your letters every night before I go to bed. So far the