When The Emperor Was Divine By Julie Otsuka

How the Experience of Racism can Change a Child’s Mindset.

America no doubt has an abundance of stains in its history, the Japanese internment camps being one of them. Unfortunately, some people have forgotten, or have swept the act out of sight and used money as “compensation” for the trauma inflicted upon millions of Japanese families that they still face the repercussions of today. The book When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka paints a truthful recount of the criminalization of Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The books details the life of a typical Japanese American family consisting of a mother, sister, and brother forced to leave their life as they know it in California behind to hop on a train to an internment

The cold blooded murder committed to “White Dog” by a woman he trusted for many years stained his white fur red. White dog didn’t know any life outside of his loving family. Later that same family turned on him, forever destroying the life he once knew. The white dog was depicted as an outside dog, a dog that mostly ran wild with no limitations, just like the wild white stallion the girl imagines on the train to the internment camp. The girl wonders about a free white horse, greeting a cowboy who goes out to the desert for a new horse, the girl goes deeper into thought as she imagines, “a cowboy snapping his fingers and a horse, a wild white stallion, galloping up to him, in a cloud of hot swirling dust” (Otsuka 29). The stallion, who was once unchained and at liberty, approached a cowboy who would fence it in, likely for the rest of it’s life. Ultimately, meaning that the horse will never be free again. The horse once only knew it’s wild and free life, it’s beautifully white coat glistening in the sun. Was then captured and life as it knew it was over. White dog

The first day the family stepped out of the train, the dessert was described as a “blinding white glare of the dessert” (Otsuka 48). The color and atmosphere of the desert changes, the longer the family is fenced in there, the more the thoughts start to wonder. The more their life and thoughts as they knew them, it changed before their very eyes. The voice of color can communicate many things, it’s the color white representing pure, free, active innocence in it’s best moments. The fenced in life of the Japanese American family and the dead horse meat relate to each other because they were both once free and trauma will forever change them. The novel explains that the color white often gets muddied with red, usually representing change, blood, and hostility. The color white being stained with this violent color symbolizes the pure white no longer being pure anymore. Moreover, the blood trickling down the white dog’s unalloyed fur, the once free white horse the girl imagined possibly being turned into red meat, and the color of the desert sky turning from white to red, all of these things forever changing