Emperor Was Divine Thesis

Childhood memories are always the best part to remember and reminisce about. That’s when everyone is young, innocent, and always only about having fun. But not everyone has the kind of memories that are worth remembering. When the Emperor Was Divine, written by Julie Otsuka, seems to be only talking about a rough time a girl had to go through but it’s actually about how her experiences of the journey greatly impacted her and which made her lose identity.

The novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, tells a story of a Japanese-American family’s a miserable experience in internment camps during World War II. Although the story is based on a family of four nameless people, the father, the mother, the daughter and the son, the whole family represented

At the cusp of adolescence, the girl is portrayed as quite inquisitive, friendly, and also has a strong American identity. She wears Mary Jane shoes, loves listening to Dorothy Lamour, and also loves American candy (Otsuka 13, 24). The author probably mentioned these parts to emphasize the fact that the girl has little connection the to Japanese culture. While they were on they train, on their way to the camp, the brief conversation the girl has with the old man emphasizes her assimilated American identity. The author uses the fact that she is a typical American girl to make it clear how racist people back then were, enough to believe that Japanese people cannot assimilate, and therefore must be Japanese spies. As the girl is a Japanese and deemed a betrayer, a lot of racism appeared in the story. But the racism appears to be even more absurd when author mentions that soldiers are being employed to guard the Japanese Americans. They were captured as if they are enemy combatants rather than families with children. Even though there is no certain evidences suggesting that these Japanese are spies, they were already not even treated as a human beings anymore. The Japanese people completely lost their identities even before they were found guilty for the crimes the government accused them of, but which they’ve never

The author portrayed how out of place the girl was by the time she returned. The girl’s encounters at school manifests her loss of identity and her helplessness. Once she returns to school, she finds that the school’s attitude to her has changed. “Perhaps they had never expected us to come back and had put us out of their minds once and for all long ago. One day we were there and the next day, poof, our names had been crossed off the roll books, our desks and lockers, reassigned, we were gone”(Otsuka, 121). The change of the classmates’ and school’s attitudes to them not only was an obvious representation of her but also of all Japanese children’s. In the Japanese children’s view, their classmates never expected that they will come back and that they have put them out of mind. The fach that even if the Japanese children have encountered such a hardship in their childhood, the classmates still do not show sympathy to them, makes them feel a sense of identity loss which they were already feeling to start with. They weren’t apologized and welcomed after being wrongly accused but still made the Japanese children feel interfere. The Japanese become isolated by the outside society, which causes their loss of