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When The Emperor Was Divine By George Takei

627 Words3 Pages

Julie Otsuka's book, When the Emperor Was Divine, and George Takei's TED talk both offer insightful information about the conditions of the Japanese Internment Camps. Takei was only a young child when he was put into an internment camp. Many of the tragedies that occurred in the camps were not noticeable by him at the age of 5. This was a blessing for Takei, the less he understood about the camp the better his mental state was. Takei adapted to the horrid conditions of the internment camp because of his naïveté. Unlike Takei, the boy in the book had a hard time believing that the camp was his reality “AT NIGHT he woke up crying out, “Where am I?” Sometimes he felt a hand on his shoulder and it was his sister telling him it was all just a bad dream”(43). …show more content…

The boy on the other hand spent a lot of his time at the camp thinking about his father and how his life would be after the camp. By distracting himself with thoughts about the future the boy was able to avoid thinking about the horrible conditions of the camp. In When the Emperor Was Divine the children were still aware of many of the horrors that happened in the camps. One day a man was killed near the fence in the middle of the night,“It was his belief that his friend had been reaching out to pick the flower when the shot had been fired"(71). The family in the book portrayed the camps to be a horrible place where it was dangerous all the time, if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time you could be killed instantly. There were a certain set of rules that the boy knew he must never break. He couldn't say the name of the Emperor, stare in the sun, or touch the fence. To the family in the book the internment camp was a gloomy dry place that was supposed to crush the spirits of Japanese-Americans. Takei in the other hand had a different view on the

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