When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the stories I remember from my childhood involved the Tanforan Race Track just south of San Francisco. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Americans of Japanese descent were held at this racetrack before they were forced on trains and sent to one of ten internment camps. My mother often recounts her father driving their family to Tanforan to bear witness to this wrong. My grandfather said to my mother and uncle, “ You should know that treating people this way is immoral.” 

I recently told this story to a friend of mine who suggested I read Julie Otsuka’s 2002 novel, When The Emperor Was Divine.  I highly recommend it. 

The novel begins, “The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of the bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth’s. It hung by the entrance of the YMCA.”  This seems like an intriguing and innocuous first few sentences. However, it is the spring of 1942 and the signs plastered around Berkeley order all Japanese-American families to report to the “Civil Control Station at the First Congregational Church on Channing Way.” 

A nameless Japanese-American woman sees the signs around her neighborhood not far from the Berkeley campus. She begins to pack, buries valuables in her backyard, burns sacred family treasures and photos from their life in Japan and kills the family pets.  She has already experienced first-hand the wave of anti-Japanese hysteria.  The FBI had taken her husband in the middle night from their comfortable home and ended their simple life. He was now being held at a camp for enemy combatants. 

By Chapter 2, it is September of 1942 and this unnamed woman, her elementary school age daughter and son are on a train to the Topaz internment camp in the Utah desert. Identification numbers are pinned to their clothing. Bricks are thrown at the train as it makes it way from the Bay Area to Utah.  The mother warns her children to never say the Emperor’s name out loud in any context.  

Life in the camp is monotonous and the living conditions appalling. The dust, wind, cold, and stress of not knowing when their confinement will end torment the family. The young boy lies awake wondering what horrible thing he had done that caused his family to be sent to this dreadful place.  Some nights he remembers his bedroom at home. But most nights he replays the traumatic vision of his playful and poised father being placed in the back of the police car in his robe and slippers. 

It’s a short novel, just 144 pages. In simple poetic prose, Otsuka transmits the strong emotions of indignity, shame and rage that each character feels. It is difficult to process this unfathomable alteration to their lives. By the time the family reunites in their Berkeley home 3 years and 5 months later; their sense of themselves and their place in the community has dissolved. They are psychically scarred. How could they not be? Julie Otsuka’s powerful novel bears witness to this horrific episode in our history.