Question 1

What was Japanese-American internment?

Accepted Answer

Japanese-American internment refers to the forced relocation and incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast of the United States — approximately two-thirds of them American citizens — during the Second World War. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, authorizing the military to designate 'exclusion zones' from which people of Japanese ancestry could be removed. Japanese Americans were given days or weeks to report to assembly centers, where they were held before being transported to one of ten permanent 'relocation centers' in remote inland locations — including Topaz, Utah, which is the setting for When the Emperor Was Divine. Families lost their homes, businesses, and possessions; many were held for three or four years. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders in Korematsu v. United States (1944). In 1988, the Civil Liberties Act acknowledged that the internment had been unjust and issued a formal apology and reparations of $20,000 to each surviving internee. The Korematsu decision was formally repudiated by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii (2018).

Question 2

Why does When the Emperor Was Divine not name its characters?

Accepted Answer

The novel's major characters — the mother, the daughter, the son, the father — are not given names throughout the book, and this namelessness is one of the novel's most important formal choices. Otsuka has said that the names felt less important than the experiences, but the namelessness also does something specific in the context of internment: it suggests that the family's individual identities were, in an important sense, taken from them by the internment itself, replaced by identification numbers and the generic category of 'enemy alien.' The namelessness also makes the family simultaneously specific — we follow their particular experience in detail — and representative: they are one family, but they stand for the 120,000 people who were interned. The final section of the novel gives voice to the father's return from the even harsher conditions of the Department of Justice internment camps (where men suspected of disloyalty were held separately from their families), and his voice is the most jagged and most directly accusatory in the book — a formal shift that the namelessness makes more rather than less powerful.

Question 3

How does When the Emperor Was Divine portray the aftermath of internment?

Accepted Answer

The novel's most distinctive and most disturbing section is its fourth part, which describes the family's return to Berkeley after the war. They return to find their house vandalized and looted, their neighbors hostile or indifferent, and a community that has been expected to resume normal life as if the internment had not happened. The novel is unsentimental about the damage the internment did to the family's interior life: the son's rage, the mother's depression, the father's dissolution into self-accusation. The final section — narrated in the father's voice, in what may be a hallucinatory monologue — enacts the internment's damage most directly: it is a catalog of everything the father lost and of the self-contempt that the internment produced in its survivors. Otsuka has said that she wrote the novel after learning about her own family's internment experience; the restraint and formality of the prose is partly a response to the silence that surrounded that experience in her family and in Japanese-American culture more broadly.

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