When The Emperor Was Divine

WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE

by Julie Otsuka

 

Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2004, Women’s Prize Longlist 2003

 

Date Read: March 26, 2023

 

The internment of Japanese Americans is a stain on the history of the U.S. When The Emperor Was Divine is a novel about the personal experience of those Americans who were taken from their homes, rounded up and incarcerated. During a time when racism against Japanese was at an all-time high, the acts of the federal government intensified and institutionalized those sentiments.

 

With only two weeks’ notice, Japanese Americans were told to pack up their lives and prepare to report to camps. Possessions were sold, with speed superseding price, effectively robbing these Americans of their wealth. Although they were allowed to retain their real property, family heirlooms, appliances just paid off, cars and clothing that wouldn’t fit into a suitcase needed to be sold or stored. Many made profit at the expense of this devastation: what didn’t sell turned into fodder for neighbors and countrymen, possessions being picked over by vultures. Possessions were taken away.

 

Everything that goes into making a home, all the creature comforts were left behind for an unchosen and uncertain new reality. Armed with only what they could carry, families were removed from their homes and forced into detention centers that were ill prepared to receive them. In this family’s case, the father had already been arrested and imprisoned separately from his wife and children, so the wife and mother here had to manage this herself. Self-determination was taken away.

 

Families were relinquished to sleep in racetrack barns that smelled like horses, with no more than a piece of cloth or canvas separating them from everyone else. Every fight, conversation, crying baby or couple making love could be heard by everyone else. Privacy was taken away.

 

Rounded up in buses and then trains that spewed coal dust, these families were shipped off to camps where they would spend the next 3 years. They were served the bare minimum of food, scarcity being the only consistent thing they consumed. Sustenance was taken away.

 

Kids were forced out of their schools. If they were close to graduation, they had to forego that honor while their classmates proceeded into college. Smaller kids were deprived of progressing at the same rate as their peers, although the adults in the camps did their best to keep up their lessons. Education was taken away.

 

And when the war came to a close and these citizens were no longer considered a threat (not that they ever really were in the first place), they were given a bus or train ticket home, with no renumeration, compensation or way to support themselves. In the case of this family, they were able to come home to their original house but it had been robbed and vandalized beyond recognition. And their neighbors greeted them with skepticism and suspicion, not welcoming arms. These families were left on their own to reconstruct what they could from the ashes of their former lives.

 

And to this day, no formal apology has been offered, no acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Hundreds of thousands of lives were upended and no recognition whatsoever has ever been offered. 

 

Otsuka deftly put a human touch to this experience: what it was like to dispense with a life and be flung into uncertainty and chaos; what it’s like to have your freedom and daily life taken away; what it’s like to live with boredom and constant stress. Otsuka gives a voice to the unimaginable.