When The Emperor Was Divine By Julie Otsuka

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Many American teens do not know what an internment camp is. The camps are built on their country’s soil. Teens like them and even younger children were being imprisoned in the country with their families for the sole crime of being Japanese. In Julie Otsuka’s novel When the Emperor was Divine, she writes about a Japanese American family forced to live in an internment camp after the events of Pearl Harbor. The FBI takes their father to a dangerous alien camp and separates him from his family. After the war ends, they are released but can never fully go back to normal. The family in Otsuka’s novel experiences guilt over Pearl Harbor and the war; despite not doing anything wrong, the guilt causes them to assimilate and lose their cultural identity.
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Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

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…

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When The Emperor Was Divine

as when the parents don’t let the kids sit at the adult table during the family Thanksgiving dinner because they are too young, or when an entire group is denied rights and participation just because of how they look or what some members of that community do. These forms of marginalization have very drastic effects on people, as they might even consider denying their true identity and making an alien identity their own. We see these examples of identity in the stories of When the Emperor was Divine…

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Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

they were released, they could never go back to the life they once had. When the Emperor was Divine, written by Julie Otsuka, tells the tale of a family that was forced to live in one of these internment camps for years. This book shows the struggles and changes that both the children and parents faced, trying to survive in a country that was once their own, but has now labeled them “enemy aliens”. When the Emperor was Divine illustrates how xenophobia can poison society, destroying people’s lives…

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What Life Once Was: The American Dream is something that millions of people from every country try their whole lives to obtain. Although they all work very hard, plenty of them still are not able to acquire such a life. The struggles that the family is going through are never ending. In Julie Otsuka’s “ When the Emperor was Divine”, the family faces continual hardships. They start with living the American Dream, then they are sent into the internment camps which creates much of their problems through…

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Culture is extremely important to many people and plays a huge role in their lives, but what happens if their culture is challenged or oppressed? In the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and from “When the Emperor was Divine” by Julie Otsuka both protagonist’s cultures are challenged. To some people, their culture means everything to them, so if someone were to try to take that away from them, they would likely be more than displeased. However, some changes cannot be avoided. Resisting change…

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Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

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completely innocent and were blamed by association. The family in When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka illustrated how injustice can change people for good or for bad. The internment camps had a huge effect on the sister changing her into a negative person. In the beginning of the book, the sister was an excellent student who obeyed her mother’s request.They were running their daily routine on the day before they had to move. However, when she returned home from school she realized,…

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