When The Emperor Was Divine Thesis

Oppression, Freedom, and Hope: The Story of Japanese-Americans

A National Library of Medicine study findings indicate that there is a positive relationship between empathy for animals and empathy for humans (Gómez-Leal 2021). This association in turn might explain the emotional connections readers have to novels in which the experiences of animals are used to implicitly convey the challenges humans are navigating. When the Emperor Was Divine, a novel written by Julie Otsuka, illustrates this point, through telling the story of a Japanese American family's life as they battle with being sent to an internment camp as a result of World War 2. Throughout the novel, the experiences of animals parallel the experiences of the family. More specifically,

Firstly, animals symbolize oppression throughout the novel. In chapter 1 there is an Evacuation Order Number 19 in place for Japanese-Americans in the United States, forcing the family at the center of the novel to begin packing up their things. The woman says “‘Play dead,’... White Dog turned his head to the side and closed his eyes. His paws went limp. ” Then, “she lifted [a shovel] high in the air with both hands and brought the blade down swiftly on his head”(11). The White Dog doing as it's told represents the woman and her family, as they are being oppressed by the U.S. government. The White Dog is loyal to the woman, which leads him to his death. Similarly, the woman’s family trusts what the government is telling them to do, so they don’t resist going to the internment camp. Later that night as the woman stands in the kitchen, she opens her bird's cage, and “The bird stepped cautiously onto her hand”(19). She

As the woman and her children are on the train to the internment camp, the girl “pulled back the shade and looked out into the black Nevada night and saw a herd of wild mustangs galloping across the desert”(45). The freedom that the horses have juxtaposes with how the family is confined and trapped. The shade on the train represents the barrier between the family's liberty and their constraints as Japanese-Americans. Shades are small barricades, but if they are good quality they can fully block out the sunlight from the outside. This is a metaphor for the family, given that Americans held so much hatred for the Japanese that restrictive policies were put into place, and accordingly the freedom of Japanese Americans was suppressed. While in the internment camp, the boy keeps a tortoise he found in a wooden box with sand, but chooses to give it no name. Instead “...he had scratched his family's identification number into its shell…At night he covered the box with a lid and on top of the lid he placed a flat, white stone so the tortoise could not escape”(60). The tortoise has the freedom to go where it wants in the desert, but the boy chooses to imprison it, which mirrors the family's experience of being taken away from their home and stranded in an unfamiliar place. Just like the family, the tortoise remains nameless which emphasizes the dehumanization of the family when they receive an