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Themes In When The Emperor Was Divine

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Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was divine is a novel that takes place right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the beginning of the novel, the Japanese American family consists of a mother with her two children. They are in a turning point of their lives. There are posters and signs indicating that anyone with japanese ancestry must evacuate. Immediately the family starts feeling the rejection of their neighbors and people around them. Just because of the way they look like. Shortly after that they forced into an internment camp where other people like them stayed. Allowing to only receive a few censored letters from the children’s father who was alleged to be a Japanese spy according to the US Government. Together they struggle to …show more content…

The racism takes away the individual identities they have since they are applying a stereotype to them. In the Flowers by Alice Walker it has the same theme. The man Myop finds dead was because of racism. The decaying corpse was hanged by its prosecutors. Just like the two Japanese- American children in When the Emperor is Divine, Myop’s innocence is lost since she can not ignore her reality of racism. “Myop laid down her flowers. And the summer was over.” (Walker, 1150). By laying the flowers down it conveys that the beauty of innocence is lost and summer was over. When the children in When the Emperor is Divine are in the train heading to the camps. A soldier tells them to put the shades down. The girl has a brief conversation with a Japanese man who only knows japanese. “The girl shook her head and said she was sorry she only spoke English” (Otsuka, 28) By saying this the girl emphasises the fact that she is a American girl and she has that identity and not just a japanese spy. The soldiers guarding the Japanese-American families makes guarding absurd. Since they are just typical families it just emphasises how people act with racism and just fear of something

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