When The Emperor Was Divine By Julie Otsuka

The novel, When the Emperor was Divine, is written by Japanese American author, Julie Otsuka. It captures the tragic life experience of an ordinary Japanese American family during WWI and depicts how their identities and personalities shift by going through internment camps. At the time when the novel took place, the U.S. and Japan were on the opposite side of the war. The U.S. government feared that Japanese Americans may secretly support their original country. To eliminate that possibility, the U.S. government put all Japanese Americans with at least one-sixteenth of Japanese blood in internment camps, until the end of the war. The characters in the novel, are not meant to be unique individuals but are meant to be a representation of all

The children resist accepting the man standing in front of them as their father, for his head has turned “bare” (131), and “his face was lined with wrinkles,” (131) and there was nothing about him resembling the man in their memory. It is possible that Otuska employed only memory to describe the father in the previous section to contrast with the now shocking and reversed reality, stressing the devastating impact an internment camp can do on a person. The father is slimmer than ever as whenever the children try to hug him they “could feel his ribs through the cloth of his shirt”(132). He did not mention anything related to the camp, which can be inferred that he is too traumatized by the experience to get over it and laugh about it, but act in a silent way to protect himself from his memory. It could also be that he experienced severe brain damage as a result of traumatic experiences which causes him memory loss, as he seems to not be able to recognize the items in his family. The fact that “ he [is] suspicious of everyone (134)” of being an “informer”(134) confirms his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for which he has become neurotic and abnormal. The father appears to be only an empty shell that lacks a soul, since “always, it seemed, he had something else on his mind.” He is no longer able to live in the present as his mind is trapped forever at the internment camp, where his dignity and hopes are crashed and only desperation remained. He emotionally distances himself from the rest of the family and feels threatened to go outside, which has to be that the internment camp ruined his sense of security and that staying at home is the only safe option for him. No detailed description of what actually happened in the