Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

Consequences of Society’s Fear The woman reads the sign on the YMCA window: “She wrote down a few words on the back of a bank receipt, then turned around and went home and began to pack”(Otsuka 3). The family was being sent away but the reason was one thing and one thing only: Race. When society lives in fear, a single group of people are excluded and feared. Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine is a heartfelt book about the racism the Japanese Americans experienced after the Pearl Harbor attacks of 1941. The family must survive in the horrific internment camps without their father, who was unjustly taken from them for being Japanese. They must also endure the racism that is to come after the release of the Japanese Americans back into …show more content…
The government was afraid that Japanese Americans would side with the Emperor and possibly harm the country, so they imprisoned them to monitor them. The government racially imprisoned and mocked many Japanese Americans because of what people of the same race did. They would still intern them even if they were not guilty of any crimes against the United States because they feared the Japanese race were all loyal to the Emperor. The government wasn’t the only group being racist to the Japanese American people for their race; the citizens were just as bad. Before the family left, a lawyer promised to rent out their house while they were gone and pay them when they returned. The family returns home and they read words written on the wall of the bedroom: “On the walls there were brown stains and words sprawled in red ink that made us turn away” (Otsuka 111). When they returned home, the lawyer was nowhere to be found. People stayed in their house while they were away and wrote racial slurs on the walls of their home, even though they had done nothing wrong. This only happened because they were Japanese Americans and people blamed them for the attacks on Pearl Harbor based on the color of their

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