When The Emperor Was Divine Essay

Kyra Guilford

Mrs. Rogers

L202 1

21 February 2023

The Relationship Between the Boy and the Father In the novel When the Emperor was Divine, Julie Otsuka tells the story of a Japanese-American family who is forced to leave their house and travel on a train to an internment camp where they have to spend some time. When they were taken, they did not know where they were going or how long they would be gone. The family consisted of the mother, the girl, the boy, and the father, which is not heard from very often. The FBI took the father away in the middle of the night before the family had to go off to the camp. Throughout most of the story, the mother and the children are alone without the father and communicate with him only through postcards

The boy talked about how his father used to call him many different nicknames and call him “my absolute numero uno” (Otsuka 64). Afterward, the boy talked about how his father used to comfort him when he had a nightmare, but once he returned after being taken he did not do that anymore. The boy is constantly mentioning how he and his father used to play baseball together, but they stopped doing that when he got back home. All of the things that the boy and the father used to do stopped as soon as the father returned

They had many unimaginable experiences that majorly affected the rest of their lives. The Japanese got treated terribly in the internment camps as if they were prisoners even though they did not commit any crime. For example, the Japanese had to follow a list of rules in internment camps while they living in the internment camps (Otsuka 61). They were surrounded by a barbed wire fence and they could not go outside of the fence, which sounds a lot like a jail cell. During each meal, they had to eat as quickly as possible to be able to go and get a second serving. The boy explains, “There was no running water and the toilets were half a block away.” (Otsuka 51). This shows even more that the Japanese in these camps were treated like prisoners. The toilets were not close to everyone and had to be shared. The barracks did not include any running water which means that if they were thirsty, they just had to wait. This heavily affected the Japanese because being treated could have made them think much less of themselves. They most likely thought that they did something to deserve this since they were treated this way. This feeling would have stuck with them throughout their lives, always dwelling on what they could have done differently to not go through