When the Emperor Was Divine

“In a few hours he and the girl and their mother would wake up and go to the Civil Control Station at the First Congregational Church on Channing Way. Then they would pin their identification numbers to their collars and grab their suitcases and climb up onto the bus and go to wherever it was they had to go.”

The family members, upon evacuating, has their identity reduced to a number pinned on their collars. This is one of the many ways in which they are forced to give up their old identities. It is also a parallel to the Nazi practice of tattooing prisoners in concentration camps with numbers for identification.

“All summer long they had lived in the old horse stalls in the stables behind the racetrack. In the morning they had washed their faces in the long tin troughs and at night they had slept on mattresses stuffed with straw. Twice a day when the siren blew they had returned to the stalls of the head count and three times a day they had lined up to eat in the mess hall on the ground floor of the grandstands. […] One night when the flies were very bad and they could not sleep he had sat up suddenly in his cot and told her that when he grew up he wanted to be a jockey.”

The conditions in their first detention center were difficult and undignified, in a way that hypocritically echoes the Nazi concentration camps that the Americans are fighting against in the European theater of the war. This passage also reveals that the boy responds to any situation of adversity by conjuring up hopeful fantasies. He even converts the experience of living in a horse stall to the ambition to become a jockey.

“‘When did you stop wearing lipstick?’

‘Two weeks ago. I used it all up.’” 

The mother has been keeping up appearances while in the detention facility, but she is no longer able to do so. Little by little, she has used up the resources she had for the luxury of maintaining her old appearance. As she loses these resources, she loses another connection to her old way of life and essentially her identity.

“Later that evening, the girl awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Someone had thrown a brick through the window.”

Someone attacks the train of Japanese Americans as it passes through Nevada. The narrator doesn’t dwell on the incident, but the reader can infer that it is an act of domestic terrorism, intended to intimidate the passengers of the train. This is another example of the family’s alienation from the community and how the Japanese Americans are being met with violence and resentment.

“She pulled back the shade and looked out into the black Nevada night and saw a herd of wild mustangs galloping across the desert. The sky was lit up by the moon and the dark bodies of the horses were drifting and turning in the moonlight and wherever they went they left behind great billowing clouds of dust as proof of their passage. The girl lifted the shade and pulled her brother to the window and pressed his face gently to the glass and when he saw the mustangs with their long legs and their flying manes and their sleek brown coats he let out a low moan that sounded like a cry of pain but was not.”

The boy previously expressed the hope that they would see horses. When his sister sneaks a look outside, she sees some and calls him over to see. The contrast between the horses and the children is stark: the horses are able to leave proof of their passage.

“Far away, on the other side of the ocean, there was fighting, and at night the boy lay awake on his straw mattress and listened to the bulletins on the radio.”

When they arrive at the camp, the boy thinks to the war that has caused them to come here. His description of the war reveals that the fighting feels far away and slightly disconnected from his reality. This is a building block in Otsuka’s rendition of the theme of displacement and alienation.

“Mostly, though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.” 

Life in the camp feels bereft of activity. Normal tasks start to take on the importance of major events, as a way to break up the monotony of the days. Time stretches onwards painfully, with no end of the internment in sight.

“The shoes were black Oxfords. Men’s, size eight and a half, extra narrow. He took them out of his suitcase and slipped them over his hands and pressed his fingers into the smooth oval depressions left behind by his father’s toes and then he closed his eyes and sniffed the tips of his fingers. Tonight they smelled like nothing. The week before they had still smelled of his father but tonight the smell of his father was gone.”

The boy hangs onto the shoes as a source of connection to his absent father. His father’s possessions have become a talisman of sorts. Along with his active dream-life, holding onto the shoes is the boy’s way of keeping his father’s memory alive. However, the memory, like the scent, dissipates over time.

“He wondered if you could see the same moon in Lordsburg, or London, or even in China, where all the men wore little slippers. And he decided you could, depending on the clouds. ‘Same moon,’ he whispered to himself, ‘same moon.’”

The boy thinks about the moon as a common point that he shares with people in far flung locations. It connects him to the world outside the camp, including to his father, who is in a similar camp in a different part of the country. The boy’s ability to engage in this sort of thinking is linked to his resilience in the camp setting. 

“You’ve been brought here for your own protection, they were told. It was all in the interest of national security. It was a matter of military necessity. It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty.” 

The people in the internment camp are assured that this experience is a good thing for them. Given the incident with the brick on the train, there is some validity to these arguments. However, they are also a way to justify the arrest of people without evidence that they have committed any crimes.

“From his window the boy had watched as they led his father out across the lawn in his bathrobe and slippers to the black car that was parked at the curb. He had never seen his father leave the house without a hat on before.”

The boy remembers the night the FBI took his father. His childlike observation about his father’s hat reminds the reader exactly how young and vulnerable he is. The details of the hat and the slippers become significant again, when the father tells his own story in the final chapter.

“She told him about the seasons and hibernation. She said that any day now she’d be bleeding. ‘It’ll be red,’ she said.”

The sister announces to her brother that she expects to start menstruating soon. She reveals that she is excited about the prospect, which reveals her as attentive to the transition to womanhood. The boy simply takes this as a simple fact.

“She turned to him. ‘I lost an earring on the train. Did I ever tell you that?’ [...]

‘Maybe it rolled behind the seat.’

‘Or maybe,’ she said, ‘it’s just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there’s no getting them back. That’s just how it is.’” 

The mother is beginning to shift into a fatalist and depressed attitude. This development is consistent with her helplessness in the first chapter. The experience of watching her husband arrested and being taken to the camps has robbed her of her sense of agency and plunged her into the depression. 

“Who was winning the war. Who was losing? His mother no longer wanted to know. She had stopped keeping track of the days. She no longer read the paper or listened to the bulletins on the radio. ‘Tell me when it’s over,’ she said.’ […] Most days she did not leave the room at all. She sat by the stove for hours, not talking. In her lap, an unfinished letter. An unopened book. She wore […] a pair of baggy trousers. A heavy sweater. […] She said she no longer had any appetite. Food bored her. ‘Go ahead and eat without me,’ she said. […] She said she didn’t want rice. She didn’t want anything anymore. Not a thing.”

The mother’s depression increases dramatically. The sense of helplessness has become overwhelming to the point of finding everything pointless. The boy, at this point, is drawn into her state of helplessness: he is unable to get her to eat any food, and nothing he can do will change that. This foreshadows his helplessness to bring back his old father when they return to their home.

“When we came back after the war it was fall and the house was still ours. [...] We had left in the spring, when the magnolia trees were still in bloom, but now it was fall and the leaves on the trees were beginning to turn and where our mother’s rosebush had once stood there was only a clump of dead weeds.”

When the mother and the children return to their home, the garden illustrates the passage of time and the deterioration that has occurred in their absence. The rosebush is an important image throughout the chapter, and its loss is introduced here. The house, on the whole, is in much worse shape than they left it. They must struggle to regain their old home, a symbolic struggle that captures their attempt to regain their connection to their neighbors.

“The key had become a part of her. It was always there, a small, dark shape, dangling [...] just beneath the surface of her clothes.”

The mother has kept the key to their home and their belongings safe at all times, revealing the intensity of her fear that she might lose everything. She is justified in this fear: even though they get the house back, it’s not in the condition they left it in. Other people were even less lucky in having no homes to return to at all.

“The house did not smell good. We did not care.”

Although there are some difficult things about the return, these difficulties are overshadowed by the joy of their homecoming. When the children first re-enter the home, the material reality of the house does not matter to them. What matters is that they are back. This is a brief moment in the experience, before the material reality becomes painfully relevant to them again, which occurs once the joy of return has worn off.

“Many people had lived in our house while we were away but we did not know who they were or where they had gone, or why we had never received a single check in the mail from the man who had promised to rent out our house.” 

The home has been occupied in their absence, in an exploitative way. Their house manager stole their rent checks. This is another significant example of the price the family has had to pay, although they were never proven to have committed any wrongs.

“We were free now, free to go wherever we wanted to go, whenever we pleased. There were no more armed guards, no more searchlights, no more barbed-wire fences. Our mother went out to the market and brought back the first fresh pears we had eaten in years. She brought back eggs, and rice, and many cans of beans.” 

The children describe the overwhelming sweetness of their physical freedom and the physical abundance they experience upon their return to their home. After the enforced deprivation of the detention center, the experience of being able to control their movements and enjoy fresh fruit are treasured. The simplicity of the pleasures they enjoy throws into even sharper relief the extent of the deprivation they have suffered. 

“They had all seen us leave, at the beginning of the war, had peered out through their curtains as we walked down the street with our enormous overstuffed suitcases. But none of them came out, that morning to wish us goodbye, or good luck, or ask us where it was we were going (we didn’t know). None of them waved. [...] Now when we ran into these same people on the street they turned away and pretended not to see us.”

The children become aware that they are strangers in their own home town, ostracized by their neighbors. They confront not only the neighbor’s apparent apathy—or at least, their unwillingness to act—but also their callousness about the horrific experience they have endured while they were gone. The insult of the apathy is compounded by the injury of the new wave of discrimination. It would be bad enough if they went through this and no one cared, yet it is much worse now that they are back and cannot be included in the daily life of their own community. 

“For the next several days we did nothing but wait for the hours to pass.”

When the children get the news of their fathers return, they experience the slow passage of time for the first time since returning from the camp. This reveals that the internment experience was not only a prison for their bodies, but also of their hearts. Their sentence began when their father was arrested, and it will not end until he is back.

“Our father, the father we remembered, and had dreamed of, almost nightly, all through the years of the war, was handsome and strong. He moved quickly, surely, with his head held high in the air. He liked to draw for us. He liked to sing for us. He liked to laugh. The man who came back on the train looked much older than his fifty-six years.”

The father comes back diminished by the war. He is aged beyond recognition, a facet of his loss of identity and consequence of the war. He has more in common with the struggling veterans returned from abroad than he does with his own family.

“He wore the same loose baggy trousers every day and was convinced that someone was watching the house. He did not like to use the telephone—You never know who might be listening—or to eat out in public. He rarely spoke to anyone unless he was spoken to first. Why go looking for trouble? He was suspicious of everyone: the newspaper boy, the door-to-door salesman, the little old lady who waved to us every day as we passed by her house on our way home from school. Any one of these people, he warned us, could be an informer.”

The changes in the father are not only physical, but mental as well. He shows signs of depression and paranoia. The father suffers terribly as he attempts to reconnect with his old life.