The following essays are sample student assignments about When the Emperor Was Divine. For formatting reasons, Dr. Remler has omitted the works cited citations from each essay. When you assess these essays, read with the knowledge that both students did turn in works cited pages. Print these essays and bring them to class on Monday, November 30th. Be prepared to critique them in class.
When the Emperor Was Divine
Nobody likes to be stereotyped. But ever since man civilized the world, people have been stereotyping others. Most of the time, stereotyping is based on race. Although adults understand the ignorance behind racism, children have a harder time comprehending why others dislike them because of the color of their skin or the shapes of their eyes. In When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka, the little brother is not only the target of racism but a prisoner because of it. Because he has not developed mature reasoning skills, the only way he can make sense of such hatred is to conclude he is the cause of it. The little boy in When the Emperor was Divine forms strange little pseudo-concepts about himself and his father as a result of enduring racism.
Before he is shipped to the camp, the little boy confronts racist remarks from people in his town. For instance, when a white man stops him on the street and asks him “Chink or Jap,” the boy replies “Chink” and runs away. “Only when he got to the corner did he turn around and shout “Jap! Jap! I’m a Jap!” Just to set the record straight.” (Otsuka 76). Although the boy lies about his race to avoid hateful remarks, he also knows it’s wrong to be dishonest, so at the last minute he asserts himself. Only it’s too late.
You can’t blame the boy for denying his heritage. He learns that behavior from his own mother who tells him to lie. “The next day, for the first time ever, she sent the boy and his sister to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their lunch pails. “No more rice balls,” she said. “And if anyone asks, you’re Chinese.” How can you learn how to reject racism when your own mother is telling you to hide from it?
The boy might have been better off if the mother had explained the reasons behind her lessons to lie. In addition to being taught dishonesty, the boy met with hostile regulations in his community which also confused his perception of racial discrimination.
Later there were rules about time: No Japs out after eight pm.
And space: No Japs allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes.
Later the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park was renamed to the Oriental Tea Garden.
Later, the signs that read INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY were up all over town and they packed up their things and they left.
The only thing the boy could have learned from his home experiences and these hateful rules was that he, as a Japanese citizen, was bad.
Then he heard rumors about what would happen to his people once they were in the camp: “They would be sterilized. They would be stripped of their citizenship. They would be sent to a desert island and left there to die. They would all be departed to Japan. They would never be allowed to leave America. They would be held hostage until every last American POW got home safely. They would be turned over to the Chinese for safekeeping right after the war.”
It’s hard enough for adults to make sense of senseless hatred, but it’s even harder for a boy of six years old or so. He’s been removed from his home, told most of his daily customs are illegal, and he’s lost his father. He wonders over and over where his father is and when he’ll come home. He imagines his father returning to him on a horse like some kind of hero in a dime store novel. The only way the boy can make sense of the traumatic changes in his life is to find answers in himself.
The day after the FBI had come to the house he had found a few strands of his father’s hair in the bathtub. He had put them in an envelope and placed the envelope beneath the loose floorboard under his bed and promised himself that as long as he did not check to make sure that the envelope was still there—no peeking, was his rule—his father would be all right. But lately he had begun waking up every night in the barracks, convinced that the envelope was gone.
From this scene we see the boy’s reasoning skills are clearly twisted. Although hiding hair in an envelope can in no way protect a person from danger, the boy had willed that hidden envelope to have some kind of magical power to keep his father safe.
So much of the boy’s life was beyond his control. Therefore, he grasped at things that he could control. Maybe the hair in the envelope was an attempt to control something. Another thing he tried to control was a turtle. Because he had no friends, he made one out of the turtle, which he kept in a box:
The boy did not have a best friend but he had a pet tortoise that he kept in a wooden box filled with sand right next to the barrack window. He had not given the tortoise a name but he had scratched his family’s identification number into its shell with the tip of his mother’s nail file. At night he covered the box with a lid and on top of the lid he placed a flat stone so the tortoise could not escape. Sometimes, in his dreams, he could hear its claws scrabbling against the side of the box.
Unfortunately, the boy did not know how to care for a pet, and it eventually died. “One night he found her squatting outside beneath his window with a tin spoon from the mess hall. “I’m digging a hole to China,” she said. On the ground beside her lay the tortoise. Its head and legs were tucked up inside its shell and it was not moving. Had not moved for several days. Was dead. My fault, the boy thought, but he had not told a soul.”
Even though the boy tries very hard to control what’s going on around him, he ultimately fails. He does not realize that he can’t control what’s happening to him, and he worries constantly, often having nightmares. In one of his dreams, which he has often, he is trying to open a door which will allow him to see God. But just as he’s about to open it, he can’t. “Something always went wrong. The door knob fell off. Or the door got stuck. Or his shoelace came untied and he had to bend over and tie it.” (Otsukea 73). He never got to open that door. The dream reveals something the boy cannot grasp. That the reasons he can’t open the door are reasons he cannot help. It’s not his fault that people are hateful. It’s not his fault that he’s in a concentration camp. It’s not his fault that his father was taken away. But to the boy, everything is his fault. People’s hatred of him is so confusing that he can only assume it’s his fault. Racism has made the boy detest himself.
Daddy Dearest: The Father in When the Emperor Was Divine
When we first begin reading When the Emperor Was Divine buy Julie Otsuka, the father has already been abducted by FBI agents. We learn from the mother, daughter and son that he has been taken away in the middle of the night, in his pajamas, with only enough time to grab his tooth brush. Because the father is already gone, we must trust the mother and children’s memories of him to determine what he was like before he was taken away.
The boy misses him the most and describes him as a kind man with few flaws. “Father was a small handsome man with delicate hands and a raised white scar on his index finger that the boy, as a young child had loved to kiss.” (Julie Otsuka 62). The boy also describes the father as “extremely polite”, saying “whenever he walked intoa room he closed the door behind him softly. He was always on time. He wore beautiful suits and did not yell at waiters. He loved pistachio nuts. He believed that fruit juice was the ideal drink.” (Julie Otsuka 62).
The boy also remembers his father as a loving parent. “His father used to call him Little Guy. He called him Gum Drop, and Peanut, and Plum. “You’re my absolute numero uno,” he would say to him, and whenever the boy had woken up screaming from dark scary dreams his father had come into his room and sat down on the edge of his bed and smoothed down the boy’s short black hair. “Hush Puppy.” He whispered “it’s all right.” (Julie Otsuka 64). The father was also very conscious of what is proper. The boy remembers that when his father left, “he had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes” (Julie Otsuka 74).
In fact, the boy has almost created an idolic image of his father in his mind, remembering talks he had in which his father made glorious promises. “His father had promised to show him the world. They’d go to Egypt, he’d said, and climb the Pyramids. They’d go to China and take a nice long stroll along the Great Wall. They’d see the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Colosseum in Rome and at night, by the light of the stars, they’d glide through Venice in a black wooden gondola.” (Julie Otsuka 78). The boy also fantasized about his father as an American hero, such as a cowboy. “He pictured his father in cowboy boots and a black Stetson, riding a big, beautiful horse named White Frost. Maybe he’d rustled some cattle, or robbed a bank, or held up a stage coach—like the Dalton brothers—even a whole entire train, and now he was just doing his time with the other men.” Such a fantasy shows how the boy tries to make his father’s imprisonment a glorious thing rather than a senseless one. He liked to brag, “My daddy’s an outlaw.”
But the boy cannot stop worrying about his father: “He worried that when he saw his father again after the war his father would be too tired to play catch with him under the trees. He worried that his father would be bald.” Turns out the boy’s worries were pretty accurate. When the father returns home, he’s not the same man who promised to travel to Egypt or called his son Peanut. Instead, he’s a bitter and paranoid. And who can blame him? “The company that had employed him before the war had been liquidated right after Pearl Harbor and there was no job for him to return to.” (Julie Otsuka 134-135). “Nobody else would hire him: he was an old man, his health was not good, he had just come back from a camp for dangerous enemy aliens.” Although he was still kind to his kids, making them snacks after school, even asking them, “Tell me the news,” he didn’t really listen to them. “He leaned forward in his chair as tough he were listening but no matter what we said—a moth flew into Miss Campbell’s ear during dictation, Donald Harzbecker has been grounded for life—his response was the same. “Is that so?”
Although to the kids the falther always “had something else on his mind,” (135) he didn’t reveal to them what that something else was. However, in the last chapter, which is told from the father’s point of view, we get a thorough account of the father’s bitterness about his experience. His belligerent voice recalls how he answered questions while imprisoned: “I lied. You were right. . .It was me. I did it. I poisoned your reservoirs. I sprinkled your food with insecticide. I sent my peas and potatoes to market full of arsenic. I planted sticks of dynamite alongside your railroads. I set your oil wells on fire.” And on and on. (Julie Otsuka 140). The father admits to many ridiculous crimes to reveal how absurd U.S. officials were to suppose he’d conspire with the enemy. At the same time, the father also reveals in his bitterness the way U. S. officials ignored the important role Japanese Americans played in American society. “You know who I am. Or you think you do. I’m your florist. I’m your grocer. I’m your porter. I’m your waiter. I’m the owner of the dry-goods store on the corner of Elan. I’mthe shoeshine boy. I’m the judo teacher. . .I’m the general manager at Mitsubish. I’m the dishwasher at the Golden Pagoda.” As the father lists many jobs typically held by Japanese men, jobs for which many Japanese men were stereotyped, he also recognizes that Japanese Americans were plentiful, playing normal roles in American life, just like white Americans.
The father in When the Emperor was Divine has changed for the worse. But who can blame him? He’s been robbed of his property, robbed of his identity, robbed of his dignity. While he tries to maintain a normal face for the sake of his children, it would be ridiculous to think that he could be released from prison and start his life again just as it was before.
