Just as the first chapter sets the stage for this brief but moving, heartbreaking novel, as the unnamed woman and her family prepare for an unknown journey into an unknowable future, the reader will put aside their plans for the day, their chores, their appointments, and simply prepare to keep reading, captivated by a tale that is so immense in its cruelty, so unfair in its scope as to be unimaginable by most people, and yet, this horror, this stain upon our nation, truly took place under the watchful eyes of an America steeped in fear.
The brutality making headlines in Europe, had now marched lockstep to the United States, as an entire race of people were imprisoned for their race, their heritage, their religion, their beliefs, and although not as brutal as Hitler’s tactics were, the disgraceful and shameful behavior had an enormous impact on innocent people who truly believed they were Americans. Their lives were ruined as they were taken away, uprooted. Their belongings were looted and their homes vandalized. Americans were angry and felt justified in their cruelty and blindness. Why didn’t we imprison, Germans or Italians? Was it because they looked like us, because they didn’t attack us directly? The behavior was shameful and the blight it placed on the history of this country can never be erased.
The author does a monumental job of setting the scene, imagining characters who remain nameless, which made them nondescript, removed them emotionally from the narrative, and, at the time, from the minds of the people perpetrating the cruelty. It was as if the strangers and their suffering had no connection to reality, to those who participated in their humiliation, or to us, the readers. We, as they, were merely observers; we don’t share in the guilt. We wear blinders.
It begins with the woman. She is tired and overworked, alone and overburdened. Her husband is in prison. We see her kill the dog, without emotion, set the beloved parrot loose without a tear. She simply, stoically, does what has to be done. She has no other choice.
The Japanese were obedient. Although they were Americans, truly believed they were, they were all displaced and disowned because one among them might be a traitor. How could you know which one? You had to remove the tumor, all of it. Didn’t you?
We meet the young girl, a mere child, 10 years old, full of life. She doesn’t realize this adventure will be longer and lonely. She will enter puberty there, become a woman, away from her only home, and she will be forced to adapt. There is also her 7-year old brother, an innocent as well, playing with her as if they are going on vacation, not to a relocation area which was really a “prison” by any other name. He is missing his father desperately, wondering where he is, what is happening to him, will he ever return. Everything was unknown, a secret. He lived in his imaginings.
The father was a handsome, strong, moral man who instilled his family with hope and values. In prison, he loses all hope; he is demoralized when he returns. He is changed. He was taken away in his bathrobe, humiliated and not afforded the rights of a citizen. He was, suddenly, an enemy alien. So he returned, when the war ended, no longer having hope or a future. But, everyone suffered, didn’t they? Wasn’t it a sacrifice all had to make for the health and safety of the country?
It is really impossible to justify war when one weighs the price that is paid. The soldiers’ families were torn asunder, as men did not return home, as those that did, returned broken. All of the families were bereaved and forever changed.
As you read, you can’t help but compare the cattle cars that transported Hitler’s victims, to the trains transporting the internees; you will see the gymnasiums, the gathering places where the Japanese were assembled and then your mind will jump to the squares where the demoralized Jews gathered; the confusion of both groups will be similar, at first, their fears will be the same; where were they going, for how long? The Jews were a peaceful people; they went quietly into the night, as the Japanese did, to an unknown fate. While the one was truly a temporary if unjust transport, and the victims weren’t murdered or starved as the other nameless, numbered victims were, they were forever scarred by their experiences. In her short thoughtful sentences, this author has written a beautiful testament to the silent suffering of a people which will make the reader wonder about the cruelty that we are all capable of committing, and wonder how was this allowed to happen?

Brother, sister, and mother are sent to an internment camp during World War 2. Father is in another camp. The characters were all rather vague, and there was very little detail. I was hoping for something similar to the best book I've read on the internment camps, Farewell to Manzanar, a nonfiction first person narrative, but this was not even close.

Gorgeous in its spareness, and heartbreaking in its simplicity.

This is, quite honestly, a history I knew nothing of previously (being miles and worlds away, and the school curriculum as hideously limited as it still is) but I think through Julie Otsuka can be learned so much more than any dry textbook could ever hope to teach.

In early May, I went to see Julie Otsuka at my local library. I had not heard of her book but my interest in the imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II had been recently peaked. Little did I know that such a short, sparsely written book would have such powerful impact on me. I have thought of little else since finishing it. That so much pain and suffering could be transmitted to a reader in so few pages and using such simple terse language, is an astounding literary feat, in my opinion.

The simplicity of this novel seared my soul. The emotional turmoil imposed upon an innocent all-American family living an idyllic "Dick, Jane and Spot" existence in California, simply because they were of Japanese descent, stunned me throughout all 144 pages. When asked why she chose not to give names to the family whose experience the novel chronicles, she said, because they represent thousands of nameless families.

As the mother prepares to leave her home with her son and daughter, and tries to put their home and lives in order, one early scene sets the stage for the brutal experience her family is about to endure. She claps her hands and the family's ancient pet, White Dog, appears. She feeds him a delicious meal and speaks soothingly to him before bashing his head in with a shovel and burying him before her children get home from school. Pets are not allowed at the "internment camps" and presumably, White Dog is too old and infirm to fend for himself on the streets.

The husband/father has already been imprisoned. He writes cheerful letters to his children telling them how good the food is and how nice the weather is. Prior to their own imprisonment they probably believed him—until the children and their mother begin their own three-year imprisonment, where the deprivation they are forced to endure must surely have made the father's letters seem incredulous.

Julie Otsuka's lean and simple language belies the and psychological devastation of this experience. She matter-of-factly describes the tragicomedy of asking imprisoned Japanese men to "volunteer" to "fight for their country." When the family returns home the boy is asked whether he is "Chink or Jap" and he answers "Chink" before running away and yelling, "Jap! I'm a Jap! And these words made an unforgettable book even more so; "We looked at ourselves in the mirror and didn't like what we saw... On the street we tried to avoid our own reflections wherever we could. We turned away from shiny surfaces and storefront windows."

All Americans should understand the idiocy of the hysterical policy that led to the imprisonment of 100,000 American citizens. It is a lesson in xenophobia that is particularly relevant today.

I have been struggling for some time now to come up with an introduction for this review. I began by writing about how ridiculous the cover image of the orange paper crane is, as origami hardly figures into the book and seems to me like a stereotypical way to clue the reader into the fact that it features Japanese characters. But that seemed too negative a way to begin a review of a book I actually liked quite a lot. Then I wrote about how the internment of Japanese Americans after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack has inspired such a wealth of excellent literature, but that struck me as a flippant way to talk about one of the worst crimes the United States has ever committed against its people. So in an effort to get things going, I will simply say this: When the Emperor Is Divine is a novel about the Japanese Internment, and it is surprisingly, heartbreakingly good.

In truth, I am coming to novel kind of late. First published in 2002, it has become a classic of Asian American literature and one of the National Endowment for the Arts' "Big Read" titles. Anyway, the considerable praise the book has won is justified. Most obviously, as other reviewers have pointed out, the writing is lovely. I know nothing about Julie Otsuka except that she is also the author of The Buddha in the Attic, another historical novel about Japanese Americans set in the first half of the twentieth century. But it is immediately clear that she knows how to conjure simple images that convey multitudes and how to express big ideas in just a few relatively simple words. When the Emperor Was Divine describes four years in the life of a Japanese American family, including the Pearl Harbor bombing, the preparations to leave home, the experience of living in the detainment camp, and the first several months after returning home again at the end of the war. It tells this story from the perspectives of the mother, the daughter, the son, the daughter and son together, and the father who could be anyone's father. It does all this while also describing unforgettable scenes such as the death of the family dog. Incredibly, it does all this in about 150 swift pages -- a hard slap or cold splash of water in the face.

As stirring as Otsuka's prose is, however, I think the book's power also comes -- how do I say this? -- from that fact that it has distilled or synthesized so many previous accounts of the internment into such a compact and relatable volume. Like a lot of people, I first learned about this devastating moment in history from Jeanne and James Houston's Farewell to Manzanar, which I read as a class assignment in my freshman or sophomore year of high school. Since then, I have sought out a few additional books on the same topic, including Yoshiko Uchida's Desert Exile, which I reviewed earlier this year. Just a few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Lawson Fusao Inada's Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese Internment Experience, which collects a number of primary sources, memoirs, short stories, and other texts related to the internment, offering readers and teachers a huge amount of information between just two covers. Personally, I enjoy working my way through all these texts that offer different perspectives on the same circumstance, but I imagine that is probably not the case for most readers, particularly at the high school and undergraduate level.

When the Emperor Was Divine offers an answer to this dilemma by piecing together some of the best moments from the most memorable texts that came before it. The family's movement from Berkeley to an abandoned racetrack to the Topaz relocation center is loosely based on the events Uchida narrates in Desert Exile, as are many of the personal details about sandstorms and the internment schools. Like John Okada's No-No Boy, the book talks about the complicated feelings that ran through the detainees in these camps when they were forced to declare their loyalty to the United States by disavowing the Japanese emperor and (for males) agreeing to join the armed forces of the nation that had incarcerated them. If, on the one hand, When the Emperor Was Divine gives its characters nonspecific names ("Mother," "Son," etc.) to let us know it is describing circumstances faced by many people, on the other hand, it synthesizes the archive of previous internment-related writings to create a genuinely representational reading experience.

I would never not say that you should read only one book about the internment, but if you were planning only to read one, well, this should probably be it. It has perhaps not replaced Farewell to Manzanar as the most commonly read novel about this sad, infuriating period in American history, but signs indicate that it is headed in that direction -- particularly if teachers such as myself continue to add it to their lists of required student readings. If you haven't picked this book up yet, I say you should do it sooner than later. Fold back that irrelevant cover and dig in.

Review from blog
Those who read 'The Buddha in the Attic' should also read 'When the Emperor Was Divine' which is also set in the same premise - the lives of the Japanese in the US during WW2.
'The Buddha in the Attic' was like the voice of many and not about a single main character but 'When the Emperor Was Divine' is about one unnamed family and the final chapters are said hard-hitting like a response from all the affected person point of view to the country that is treating them like an alien. this is not a melodramatic story and it ends with a positive note about their hope.

Plot:
The story is about a Japanese family living in the US during World War II Says how men were named a traitor and prisoned secretly for years and how their families were sent to Utah desert to internment camps for years.
The family is first separated from the father and living in an internment camp, their life changes there, after years when they are back to their home they see how ruined their places are, kids are still missing their father, they are visit school and asked to not intervene the whites, they ask apologies even if their hand touches them mistakenly.
After years when their father returns the kids are not sure if it was him, he is looking different now, pale, energy drained.

Quotes from the book:
“But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger's backyard, our mother's rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light.”

"We used to live in the desert. We used to wake, every morning, to the blast of a siren. We used to stand in line for our meals three times a day. We used to stand in line for our mail. We used to stand in line to get coal. We used to stand in line whenever we had to shower or use the latrine. We used to hear the wind hissing day and night through the sagebrush. We used to hear coyotes. We used to hear every word spoken by our neighbors on the other side of the thin barrack wall ... We used to try and imagine what it would be like when we finally returned home."

Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese mail order brides in early 1900s San Francisco, was one of my first encounters with the first person plural, which I’ve come to love. It also serves as a prequel to this, her debut novel. In Berkeley, California in 1942, a Japanese man is arrested as a potential enemy combatant. His wife, son and daughter are given just a matter of days to pack their things and evacuate to an internment camp in the desert. Otsuka takes us along on the train journey and to the camp, where small moments rather than climactic ones reveal the children’s sadness and the injustice of what they’re missing out on. I most enjoyed the last section, when they all return to their home after over three years away and start to piece life back together. I’d already read a few novels featuring Japanese internment (e.g. The Japanese Lover and Snow Falling on Cedars) but, more than that, Otsuka’s writing is a tad too subtle for me.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

In 2003 the Northern California Libraries had this book as their community read. And Julie Otsuka and others came to our county to give a talk. Was glad to hear her read. And all the talks were quite informative and often broke my heart - Japanese Americans and Japanese people living in US people treated so badly It was thru this that I learned more about Japanese arts. I read the book and joined a book discussion. I liked how she wrote this; each chapter a different phase of the evacuation told by a different family member. And it was very different then Farewell to Manzanar which was my first book read on the internment camps and thus was more potent to me. I read it when I moved to CA and visited it (in theSierra Nevada Mountains.) Amstel Adams had a beautiful photoshoot of the people interned in this camp. It’s very different to hear about the camps vs see pics of the people and visit one. Most of the building were still standing when I went there in late 1990’s, though quite deteriorated. It wasn’t made into a museum like Anne Frank’s hiding place. I’ve met many people through the years who were in camps and the shame they experienced lasted for their life time. Julie Otsuka writes about those earlier times and not the subsequent times in fine and simple writing.

I saw that Julie Otsuka has a new book coming out soon called Swimmig. And plan to read her other book Buddha in the Attic before.

The novel starts in 1942 with a Japanese American mother reading an evacuation order. It then describes the logistics of getting her family and home ready for the move. Her husband had been arrested shortly after December 7th and was already in a camp.
The novel continues with shifting narratives from the mother, her daughter, and her son. The packing up by the mother, the train ride to the camp by the daughter, the first days at the camp by the son, with the shifting narratives continuing with the long years at the camp and the return to home which is just as heartbreaking as the rest of the narratives.
What makes this novel so powerful is its descriptions of every day life in the context of such unjust sadness and harshness of internment camps. It is reenforced by the realization during the novel that none of the characters are named, a reminder that they were treated as though they had no identity.

Phenomenal. Atypical prose. I was going to give this book 3 stars when on chapter 2...but this book just gets deeper and deeper into the heart of the historical fiction that it ends as a brilliantly done piece of Lit fully deserving a 5 star rating.
Read it. Read it.

The opening of When the Emperor was Divine is powerful, following in one chapter the preparations an unnamed Japanese woman in California makes to prepare for her family’s journey to an internment camp in 1942. As she quietly packs her bags, goes to the hardware store to buy a shovel for a purpose that breaks the heart, buries her silver in the garden, the calm in which she does this is what gives the chapter its effectiveness. Always known as simply Mother, the girl and the boy, Julie Otsuka manages to encapsulate the racist outrage that was perpetuated without drama in her writing, making this book more compelling by its very quietness.

We see the family through the eyes of the little boy which simplifies the process down to tiny details like wanting a Coca Cola and having a pet tortoise alongside death and mental instability. The family, whose father was taken away six months before and is held somewhere else, spend years in this desert camp and their reactions vary with the mother retreating into herself while the daughter socializes and wants to grow up fast and the son only knows that he misses his Father. It’s a slight book I read in one day but it looks at a part of U.S war time history that is too often neglected as well as what it means when war is over and life is expected to carry on as before. 4 stars.

Ahoy there me mateys! I have no idea where I first heard about this novel but it it was kismet to have picked it up to read. Ye see when I was perusing the news, I read a fascinating (and depressing) piece on the Japanese internment camps of WWII. Later that same day, I picked up this novel thinking it would be a young adult novel but found instead a fantastic historical fiction book about a Japanese family in America and how WWII affected them.

Ye see this story was "based on Otsuka’s own family history: her grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and her mother, uncle and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah." Yet the novel is told from multi-person perspective of a single family who remain nameless in the novel.

I don't know how to do this book justice - it was that good. I found this novel to be evocative, lyrical, haunting, engaging, and heart wrenching. I read it in one sitting and found meself avoiding picking up another book and pondering the ramifications in what I had read for a couple days before I could even begin to process the effects of this book on my being. And yet I continue to fail at capturing its resonance despite this effort of putting me thoughts down.

This dark period in United States history was captured beautifully and soul-crushingly in this author's work. Especially in the details. Small details helped me feel the horror of the family's pain. Images of slippers, the smell of horses in the racetrack stalls where the family was forced to live, a single rosebush. The last chapter in particular was extremely powerful.

Words truly fail me. But I recommend this one without a doubt.

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